


The Stanley Parable: Glitches, Exploits, and Quirks for the Common Stanley

by zeroBound



Category: Doki Doki Literature Club! (Visual Novel), Homestuck, The Stanley Parable
Genre: Gen, ~ATH
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-12
Updated: 2021-01-03
Packaged: 2021-03-05 20:28:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 20
Words: 52,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25851367
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/zeroBound/pseuds/zeroBound
Summary: Have you ever made the same choices in The Stanley Parable, only to receive two completely separate endings? Have you ever wanted to explore more of the esoteric zones of the office, but don't know how? Did you piss off The Narrator and are now hiding in a small crevice past the boss's office? Well, this is the guide for you!Heavily inspired by both Doki Doki Literature Club!: Bugs, Glitches and Exploits for Dummies, and the Sburb Glitch FAQ, as well as the Replay Value AU and the Doki Doki Infinite Choices AU that they spawned respectively. I absolutely recommend you check them out.NOTE: Depending on how The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe turns out, I may convert this work into a guide on Ultra Deluxe and modify some of the lore. Oh boy, I hope it comes out soon.
Comments: 27
Kudos: 27





	1. Table of Contents, Version History, and Other Introductory Notes

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Doki Doki Literature Club!: Bugs, Glitches and Exploits for Dummies](https://archiveofourown.org/works/22681066) by [CreativityTheEmotion](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CreativityTheEmotion/pseuds/CreativityTheEmotion). 
  * Inspired by [Sburb Glitch FAQ](https://archiveofourown.org/works/340777) by [GodsGiftToGrinds](https://archiveofourown.org/users/GodsGiftToGrinds/pseuds/GodsGiftToGrinds). 



**1A - TABLE OF CONTENTS**

General disclaimer: it's a real possibility that this work will be severely edited once Ultra Deluxe comes out; I'm kind of just posting this to familiarize myself with AO3 in the meantime.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1A - TABLE OF CONTENTS

1B - VERSION HISTORY

1C - INTRODUCTORY PREAMBLE

2A - HOW TO PLAY THE STANLEY PARABLE

2B - USABLE OBJECTS AND THE COWARD ENDING

2C - THE MENU

2D - CROUCHING AND THE WINDOW ENDING

2E - GLOSSARY OF TERMS

3A - THE FREEDOM ENDING

4A - THE COUNTDOWN ENDING

4B - THE BOTTOM OF THE MONITOR ROOM

4C - THE COUNTDOWN ROOM DOOR

5A - THE MUSEUM ENDING

5B - NARRATIVE ECHELONS

5C - JUST WHO IS THIS 'NARRATOR', ANYWAYS?

6A - THE GAMES ENDING

6B - THE ART ENDING

6C - THE ZENDING

7A - THE STANLEY PARABLE DEMONSTRATION

7B - THE DEMO ENDING

8A - MODIFICATION EXPLOITS

8B - THE GENOCIDE ENDING

8C - JUMPING, THE 128/POTENT ENDINGS, AND LETTING THE NARRATOR KNOW HOW YOU REALLY FEEL ABOUT THE BABY GAME (THE CRITIC ENDING)

8D - THREE DOORS, ONE DOOR

9A - DEMO SIDE EFFECTS: SAFETY FIRST

9B - SIDE EFFECT EXPLOITS

10A - THE APARTMENT AND VOID ENDINGS

10B - THE REAL PERSON ENDING

10C - NARRATIVE CONTRADICTION

10D - FINDING NARRATIVE CONTRADICTION, AND THE COLD FEET ENDING

11A - THE CONFUSION ENDING

11B - THE ADVENTURE LINE AND THE DISORIENTED ENDING

12A - CONDITIONING

12B - BENEVOLENCE, MALEVOLENCE, THE NARRATOR'S HOSTILE AND GENEROUS STATES, AND THE HOSTILE AND ALONE ENDINGS

12C - CROUCHING EXPLOITS, AND THE ANNOYED, REPETITION, AND SURVIVE ENDINGS

12D - ADDITIONAL STRANGE VALUES

13A - BACKROOMS PREFACE

13B - JUST WHO IS THIS 'NARRATOR', ANYWAYS? PART 2

13C - BACKROOMS

14A - VANILLA CHEATS AND THE SERIOUS ENDING

15A - OBJECT MANIPULATION

15B - DOORS AND RANGED OBJECT MANIPULATION

15C - CREATING INTERACTABLE OBJECTS

15D - THE HOARDER AND TRAPPED ENDINGS

16A - THE ESCAPE ENDING

16B - AN INTERESTING NEW MAP

16C - TAKING THE NARRATOR THROUGH THE ESCAPE ENDING

17A - GAMES IN DEPTH: MINECRAFT, AND THE POWERFUL ENDING

18A - STATUS AND THE STARVATION ENDING

18B - THE LOUNGE MODIFICATION AND THE NARROW REALM OF STATUS EXPLOITS

19A - THE MARIELLA ENDING

19B - HIDDEN BEHIND TARPS AND THE HEAVEN ENDING

20A - GAMES IN DEPTH: PORTAL

20B - AN EXAMPLE OF THE VICTORY ENDING

**1B – VERSION HISTORY**

Version 0.1, 8/11/2020 - Ch. 1, 2, 3 created.

Version 0.2, 8/12/2020 - Ch. 4, 5, 6 created. Removed Section 6D; The Demo Ending will be discussed in the next chapter. Made the DDLC hacker community rushing to study TSP more explicit in 1C, and added some clarification to 5B. Major edits on Section 5C and 6A as well as addition of Sentience and Cognizance to the glossary (thanks, CreativityTheEmotion).

Version 0.3, 8/17/2020 - Ch. 7 created. Added another point to section 5B. Added Side Effect to the glossary.

Version 0.4, 8/21/2020 - Ch. 8 created.

Version 0.5, 8/27/2020 - Ch. 9 created.

Version 0.6, 8/31/2020 - Ch. 10 created. Added Narrative Contradiction to the glossary.

Version 0.7 9/7/2020 - Ch. 11 created. Added The Schedule and The Stanley Parable Adventure LineTM to the glossary.

Version 0.8 9/17/2020 - Ch. 12 created. Added Safe Zones, Mood/Conditioning, Blurb, and Hostile/Generous state to the glossary.

Version 0.9 9/27/2020 - Ch. 13 created.

Version 0.91 10/7/2020 - Section 5B modified to include all endings. Section 12D and Ch. 14 created.

Version 0.93 10/17/2020 - Ch. 15 created.

Version 0.94 10/27/2020 - Ch. 16 created.

Version 0.941 11/02/2020 - Very minor edit to Ch. 16 regarding fall damage.

Version 0.95 11/07/2020 - Ch. 17 created. Minor edit to Ch. 12.

Version 0.97 11/17/2020 - Ch. 18 created. Additional entries added to the 'being spiders' list in Ch. 13. Freedom map removed from Ch. 13's classification of discrete maps - that section is in the office map and does not involve a map change.

Version 0.99 11/27/2020 - Ch. 19 created. Edits to sections 8C, 15A, 15B. New ending added to the ending lists in 12A, 12C, 15A, and 5B. Changed the previous version to 0.97 because Version 1.0 requires an extra update.

Version 1.0 1/3/2021 - Reorganization of chapters to optimize flow; Ch. 19 (object manipulation) has been moved to Ch. 15, and all subsequent chapters have been shifted by one place to make room. Edits of varying size to sections (based on the new order) 1C, 2A, 2D, 2E, 3A, 4B, 4C, 5A, 5B, 5C ('inconclusive' regarding The Curator editing environments was changed to 'likely yes' due to the Museum ending's Schedule), 6A, 6B, 7A, 7B, 8A, 8B, 9A, 9B, 10C, 10D, 12B, 12C, 12D, 13B, 13C, 15/16/17, 18A, 18B, 19A, 19B. Swapped a game possibility in section 6A. Ch. 20 and section 16C created.

Version 1.01 1/13/2021 - Very very minor edit to Ch. 16.

**1C - INTRODUCTORY PREAMBLE**

Before introducing the premise and mechanics of this game, it is worth digressing a little to discuss some important details. The Stanley Parable is currently the fourth (second out of four?) game introduced to the public to have any sort of ~ATH component (an obscure and enigmatic programming language). The other three are SBURB, a game existing in a different universe that has "unlimited creative potential", Minecraft snapshot 20w14∞, which is an April Fools snapshot with infinitely diverse explorable dimensions, and Doki Doki Literature Club! (DDLC), a visual novel which contains sentient characters and has infinitely many possible outcomes. Upon noticing this trend, The Stanley Parable caught the attention of the ~ATH community, since it's also a game with a narrator that can respond to stimuli in unpredictable ways. The community's suspicions were quickly confirmed, as we learned that the game had been hiding files with the .~acf (~ATH Compiled File) extension buried within the supposedly 'Source' based directories.

What is ~ATH, exactly? The programming language, pronounced 'til death', works on any operating system, and pretty much any computer with a basic file directory can run ~ATH programs. Its origin remains a mystery, and there is shockingly little information about the programming language on the internet. Currently, the largest community of ~ATH users is the DDLC hacker community, who have been working to understand the language from scratch. SBURB, a game speculated to reside in another universe, is commonly touted as the first program to contain ~ATH, so it's possible that its origin is linked to wherever SBURB is from.

The reality-altering properties of ~ATH are not fully understood, but as it pertains to DDLC, it's at least apparent that ~ATH can pull information from the universe, such as the player's personality and whether or not objects in the universe are alive or dead. It's also evident that ~ATH can simulate some form of sentience, since it does this for DDLC's Club President (and the other characters, although not 'Sentience' sentience). Finally, ~ATH is notorious for destroying electronics, as the language runs independently of your processor's clock cycle; this fries the circuitry and can cause serious injury to nearby objects, including the user.

The fact that ~ATH was discovered in The Stanley Parable brought a wave of people from the DDLC hacker community rushing to discover exploits and tricks that could be used to probe deeper into the game. Interestingly, there are cheats that can be used to explore the game environment (e.g. noclip), but the places you can explore with them always look as though they're exposed game areas with missing walls and zones of pure white void. It appears that the game's primary adjudicator, The Narrator, has two different mechanisms of dealing with cheaters. The first is to send cheaters to the Serious Room if they type in sv_cheats 1, and the second, more nuanced approach is to change the game environment so that the game 'appears' to lack hidden content if using noclip or similar console cheats (more on this later). It's especially interesting that the game parades around the fact that it's constructed from Source, the same engine that Portal and Half Life are made from, when in reality the game only has the superficial skin of a C++ Source game obscuring a creamy ~ATH nugget. The fact that the game tries so hard to avoid players from uncovering this part of the game was the primary motivator in leading The Stanley Parable to a gaming renaissance, and documenting the resulting exploits and glitches these players uncovered is the primary goal of this document.


	2. How To Play The Stanley Parable, Controls, Window/Coward Endings, and Glossary of Terms

**2A - HOW TO PLAY THE STANLEY PARABLE**

The Stanley Parable is difficult to place into any specific genre, even without taking the ~ATH-rich parts into consideration, but it can be reasonably categorized as a first-person story driven game. The basic premise is that Stanley works in an office building, and his co-workers have unexpectedly gone missing today; it's up to Stanley to figure out where they went and what's going on, with the help of your arguably friendly guide, The Narrator.

The primary mechanism through which you will interact with The Stanley Parable is by using the WASD keys to move Stanley through the game's setting and the mouse to look around in it. Stanley starts in his office, room #427, and the environment from here will be generated and altered as you progress by The Narrator. He will also offer commentary and guidance upon moving into unexplored areas; in particular, The Narrator will often guide Stanley towards making a specific choice when an area involves a choice of two or more divergent paths.

After reaching certain points, you will trigger an ending; this usually occurs once you have reached an area that lacks any further choices. Using exploits, these zones can lead to different areas, and thus, different choices, but for the layperson they are inert and will lead to a restart, typically due to The Narrator restarting the game or Stanley dying. The cycle repeats from here, with minor deviations in office layout and dialogue. The 'goal' of the game, if it even has one, is to see the most content and seek out new endings, although this is never explicitly stated.

Other than the WASD keys to move, what else can one do? The SPACE key, while normally used for jumping in allegedly 'Source' based games, doesn't do anything (aside from earning an achievement). There is a way to turn jumping on, but this will be discussed in a future article, and usually isn’t applicable. The only other controls of note are the ESC key, used to pause the game and enter the menu, LCLICK or E to interact with a pitiful variety of objects, and the CTRL key, used to crouch. RCLICK and the 1, 2, 3, etcetera. keys are relevant for exploits, but for now they can be ignored.

**2B - USABLE OBJECTS AND THE COWARD ENDING**

What can be interacted with in this game? Doors and buttons, primarily. Most of the doors in The Stanley Parable are locked, but a few can be opened and closed freely. This can even be used to achieve an ending; if you close the door of Stanley's office before leaving it, The Narrator will go on a lengthy soliloquy regarding Stanley's belief that the answers will come to him as long as he waits in the safety of his office, and then the game will restart.

That was a quick ending, so, I figured it would be better to get it out of the way quickly.

The computers on Stanley's co-worker's desks and the buttons on elevators and keypads can all be interacted with, but, that's pretty much it. In addition, most objects, such as mugs, pencils, and boxes, are static, although a select few can be picked up and carried around by Stanley. These include some objects found in the Games ending, as well as a mug found in The Stanley Parable Demonstration.

**2C - THE MENU**

Predictably, the menu has a variety of standard options. From the main menu after starting the application:

  1. BEGIN THE GAME



Begins the game, of course. The first run of a game is different from subsequent runs, as we will discuss in section 2E.

  1. LOAD



You can load files that have been saved during the game. This option doesn't exist unless you turn it on using OPTIONS.

  1. OPTIONS



Contains various game options, such as audio and video preferences, controls, and saving. Something of note is that the 'captions' in the audio options are not scripted; they are generated using voice recognition software applied to The Narrator.

  1. CREDITS



Views the credits; the credits sequence can be escaped using ESC.

  1. QUIT



Quits the game.

The menu while pausing in the game is different:

  1. RESUME THE GAME



Resumes the current run; ESC also does the same thing here.

  1. BEGIN THE GAME AGAIN



Restarts the run. A restart is separate from beginning the game, for various reasons, but primarily because The Narrator remembers past runs.

  1. SAVE



You can save a run and the game records the exact properties of the game at that point. Interestingly, the Portal 2 save icon is shown while saving, which is another subtle detail to make players believe the game is running on Source and is just a tweaked version of that game. Just like loading, this option doesn't exist unless you turn it on using OPTIONS.

  1. OPTIONS



Options again. Same menu.

  1. QUIT TO MENU



Quits the game and returns you to the main menu. Returning to the menu allows you to restart progress and do a first run again.

**2D - CROUCHING AND THE WINDOW ENDING**

For a story driven game with metaphysical undertones and no skill, strategy or reflex requirements, the inclusion of a crouching option sticks out like a sore thumb. Why would such an option be relevant, or even necessary, in The Stanley Parable?

It turns out the CTRL key, fittingly enough, unlocks a variety of new choices within the game environment. At a casual glance, Stanley can crouch under desks, the tables in the warehouse, stairways, the button pedestals in the Games run, buttons themselves (e.g. the one in the 8 game in The Stanley Parable Demonstration). All of this is tame and boring, but if used in the right locations, it can derail the game quite quickly.

A example of how CTRL can be used to access new zones can be found from the very start of the game, right out of Stanley's office. Go to Employee 434's desk, climb onto it using his chair, and then crouch-walk over the divider dividing 434 and 433's desk. Then, the player can crouch-walk out of the window, unearthing a new ending.

You'll fall into a box-shaped area made up of a static white void, and it appears The Narrator expected you to escape from this window (this isn't always the case). He asks if this area is fun and insightful; if you reply 'yes', he will contemplate aloud on if you consider it worthwhile to return to the window to reply 'no'; if you reply 'no', he will reprimand you, and then sing a deprecating song to Stanley. Either way, the room has no exits, so restarting is the only thing left to do here.

**2E - GLOSSARY OF TERMS**

A glossary of relevant terms is listed below, to avoid confusion. May be updated as new discoveries happen/I think of new terms.

**Stanley**

The main character, and the character you control. His employee number is #427, as The Narrator reveals in the opening cutscene.

**You/The Player**

The person playing The Stanley Parable. The Narrator almost never actually refers to you, choosing to refer to Stanley almost exclusively.

**The Narrator**

The entity that speaks to Stanley throughout the duration of the game. He observes and manipulates the game environment; he's cognizant of the fact that we are playing The Stanley Parable.

**The Curator**

Referred to by some as 'The Female Narrator', she appears in one specific ending of the game.

**The Schedule**

An entity/object in the game that can be observed past door #437. Under normal circumstances, it appears as a timer that times how long you've been playing the current ending for. In specific cases, you can observe it in its 'initialized' state, which will detail specific instructions for how to achieve an ending.

**Ending/Run**

A discrete path through the game environment, leading to a restart. This is usually referred to as an ending when discussing the path itself (e.g. the Freedom ending, the Countdown ending, the Zending ending) and referred to as a run when discussing endings _in general_ (e.g. on my next run I will take the left door/I hope I get the Notes Room on my next run).

**Echelon**

A way of ranking endings according to reliability and how much other entities in the game know about them. For more information, see section 5B.

**First Run**

The first run of a play session. It is believed that the entire game is reset before a first run, so if you want reliable results using a specific technique, it's recommended to 'QUIT TO MENU' and then 'BEGIN THE GAME'. This will reset all progress made by you/The Narrator throughout the game.

**Restart**

When the game resets during an ending, taking Stanley back to room #427, it's known as a restart. This can happen due to The Narrator, due to dying, or if you restart the game yourself from the menu.

**Modification**

A specific alteration done to the main game by an external party/The Narrator. The term usually refers to the modifications that The Narrator does during the Games ending, and these modifications can be carried over to subsequent runs. For more information, see section 8A.

**Sentience**

This means 'aware that one is in a video game'; this definition of the term is taken from the Introductory Glossary of CreativityTheEmotion's DDLC Bugs Glitches and Exploits, which I highly recommend checking out. Their definition also includes the ability to manipulate game files and is linked to a specific variable in that game; seeing as The Stanley Parable is less oriented towards direct file manipulation and places a greater emphasis on dialogue, we'll use an abridged version that omits these requirements.

**Cognizance**

This word will be used to cover all the complicated facets of _actual human interaction and thought,_ such as self-awareness, emotions, ability to react to different stimuli, etc. For example, in the context of an archetypical DDLC playthrough, you would say that all of the Dokis have Cognizance, but only Monika (or in the case of a playthrough where shenanigans are involved, the Doki with the Sentience stat) has Sentience.

For information about Cognizance and Sentience in the context of The Stanley Parable, check section 5C.

**Side Effect**

A condition applied to the player and/or Stanley after reading the list of safety concerns during the Demo ending.

**Narrative Contradiction**

An effect that causes environmental distortion and is seemingly caused by a 'mismatch' between choices The Narrator believes you have and choices you actually have. It's restricted to the map that the inciting choice was made in. More information can be found in section 10C.

**The Stanley Parable Adventure Line TM**

A yellow line that The Narrator can invoke as a tool to find the story. He does this most famously in the Confusion ending, but it appears that he can do it at any time, and will do it if he loses track of 'the story' in some way.

**Mood/Conditioning**

The general disposition of The Narrator, and it can be changed by 'conditioning' The Narrator in certain ways, such as by standing around, crouching, or achieving an ending. The four flavors are Satisfaction, Dissatisfaction, Benevolence, and Malevolence.

**Hostile/Generous State**

A condition of the game in which The Narrator actively tries to kill you or prevent your death; occurs if Malevolence is less than -0.95i or Benevolence is greater than 4.8i respectively.

**Safe Zone**

An area of the map that The Narrator can't influence directly. You can hide here during his hostile state until it wears off.

**Blurb**

Not a term used in the actual game, but it's a term the community uses to refer to the short descriptions that are given to various endings during the Repetition and Survive endings. It's believed that these descriptions are given to the endings by The Narrator.

**Map**

A discrete zone of the game environment with a set number of resources it can draw upon. Moving from one map to another requires a map change, which is recognizable by a loading screen.


	3. The Freedom Ending

**3A - THE FREEDOM ENDING**

Now that I've acquainted you with some introductory details, let's examine a typical first run of the game, wherein we follow The Narrator's instructions whenever we are given a choice. During major endings, I'll post a simplified version of the ending choices at the start, and then a more detailed analysis afterwards.

  1. Take the left door in the two doors room.
  2. Go up the stairs and through the boss's office.
  3. Go through the Mind Control Facility doors.
  4. Press 'OFF' in the facility's power room.



Exiting room #427, we will enter the office, and The Narrator will instruct Stanley to find the employee meeting room; upon entering a room with two doors, Stanley must enter the door on his left. You can enter the right to reach the employee lounge, and then detour through the maintenance section, but this a minor detail; it's also off The Narrator's normal script.

The meeting room is devoid of people, so The Narrator adjusts course, telling Stanley to seek his boss's counsel. Stanley must take a stairwell up to his boss's office, and then, when he doesn't find his boss, enter '2 8 4 5' on the keypad on the back wall to proceed, a key piece of information given to us by The Narrator. The chimney of the office opens, leading Stanley to an elevator down into the depths of the building.

Ignore the small path with the 'escape' sign on your left and walk into the doors with the 'MIND CONTROL FACILITY' lettering on it. Stanley will need to press several buttons illuminating a large, television filled chamber that appears to be monitoring the entire facility and all of Stanley's co-workers. Another elevator leads Stanley to a room filled with various buttons and panels (trust me, these ones don't do anything), which The Narrator claims are labelled with various emotions.

Finally, you'll find a power room with ON and OFF buttons. If Stanley turns the facility off, the Freedom ending will be achieved. A large, theatre-like door will begin opening as The Narrator comments on how Stanley is finally free, and about how he is happy now that his life and emotions are no longer being controlled. Ironically, despite The Narrator's insistence that 'nobody would tell Stanley what to do, where to go, or how to feel', The Narrator told Stanley exactly what to do and where to go during this ending, and the very last line of the ending is him telling Stanley how to feel: 'and Stanley was happy.' The Narrator even goes so far as to take full control of the character once you make the final choice to step outside.

The Freedom ending is The Narrator's preferred ending, and other than specific instances, he will very rarely go off script during this ending. The key zones of script deviation are at the start (right after you exit room #427), in the boss's room, in the lounge if you took the detour, and in the broom closet if you, for whatever reason, felt inclined to poke around in there. Other than that, 99.9% of the time, he will state the script precisely, every time, even if your run isn't a first run.

There are extreme instances in which he will deviate from typical dialogue, but this requires severe and explicit tampering/conditioning/exploits, and the topic will be reserved for a future chapter.


	4. The Countdown Ending, and two deviations

**4A - THE COUNTDOWN ENDING**

  1. Take the left door in the two doors room.
  2. Go up the stairs and through the boss's office.
  3. Go through the Mind Control Facility doors.
  4. Press 'ON' in the facility's power room.



What happens if, at the last moment of the Freedom ending, you decide to choose 'ON' instead of 'OFF'? Well, The Narrator is surprised that Stanley desires control rather than his own liberation. He reveals that due to Stanley not having the proper identification, a nuclear detonation is imminent within the facility. A countdown then starts; the countdown reads 2 minutes at first, but partway into the countdown The Narrator will add 70 seconds to the timer (the amount of time he adds is variable) because he wants to relish the moment. During this time, you can move Stanley around the countdown room. If you decide to try pushing the various buttons or panels around the room, The Narrator will mock you for assuming there's a way to shut down the detonation countdown. On the other hand, if you stand still and accept your fate, he becomes disappointed with your resignation, and in some cases he neglects to add more time to the countdown timer.

**4B - THE BOTTOM OF THE MONITOR ROOM; THE LEAVE ENDING**

Although it's been proven that the buttons and panels in the room don't do anything aside from make noises and sparks, there are two deviations from the ending that can be reached. The first is a crouching exploit, and it can be reached by using CTRL to crawl under the stairs that lead to the '4' button, and falling down a pit. The countdown room exists directly above the monitor room, so Stanley will fall back down to this level. If you manage to land on one of the platforms, The Narrator will comment on the unexpected turn of events, and the button to call the elevator can be pushed again. You can do this over and over, and The Narrator will become more and more exasperated each time. If this is done while the countdown is active, The Narrator will instead mock Stanley's feeble attempts at escaping the facility.

If you decide to drop into the black pit below the platforms instead, you'll reach an entirely dark area. This can also be achieved early, right after walking through the 'MIND CONTROL FACILITY' doors; on the first platform, climb on top of the chair, then the desk, and then move through the space the button is on to get to the railing. I often find that walking backwards while on the desk is the most reliable way to accomplish this. Anyways, you can use this to step off the railing into the abyss.

The bottom of this pit, surprisingly, has an exit, which leads Stanley to an elevator heading upwards. Since using the elevator leads Stanley into a different map, this will unload the bomb that The Narrator was referring to, saving Stanley from certain death. If the timer is on, The Narrator will be impressed at how Stanley managed to cheat death; regardless, he will state his curiosity on where Stanley plans to head, now that Stanley turned back from The Narrator's story at the last possible moment. If you managed to reach here early from the first platform, he instead realizes he didn't explicitly tell Stanley to push the button on the platform, and then he reprimands Stanley for not doing the obvious choice. On a subsequent run, he'll explicitly tell Stanley to press the button, leading to a more exasperated Narrator dialogue if you disobey him.

At this point, you have successfully gone off the rails of the game, and The Narrator's dialogue will no longer become reliable. You can also explore an area colloquially referred to by the community as 'the backrooms' after the creepypasta of the same name. More details on that in chapter 13, but for now, an interesting area to go to from the elevator is to take a left, a right, and then head forwards to reach the bottom of the lift room, which is normally inaccessible because falling from the lift or a higher platform results in death. The door will be the one perpendicular to the edge of the main platforms in the room, or alternatively described as the one directly facing the side of the room with the metal shutter doors. If you leave using the open B door, you get the Leave ending, which has varying dialogue depending on how you got there. If you escaped while the countdown was active, The Narrator will more often than not comment on how, although Stanley lacked the control he was seeking, he managed to destroy the horrible facility and prevent it from falling into the wrong hands. It's a rather jovial change of heart for The Narrator, but it seems as though he's hardwired to try and discern some meaning out of your choices. If the countdown was inactive, The Narrator tries to make up a story about how, now that Stanley escaped, he can warn others about the building and launch a full investigation into it, bringing the perpetrators to a proper justice. You can reach the Leave ending through other mechanisms, and find different dialogue results each time.

**4C - THE COUNTDOWN ROOM DOOR; THE FAILURE AND INCOMPETENT ENDINGS**

What about the second deviation? This requires more serious exploits, but it can be done using object manipulation, conditioning, or modifications. All of these are topics for future chapters, but the deviation itself is reached by entering the door inside the countdown room; it's the one close to the blue, box-like console. Normally this door opens after pressing the 'ON' button, and The Narrator will close it if Stanley approaches it.

If you do manage to get inside the door, you'll find another backroom area; the map is still loaded, so The Narrator will still be mocking your escape attempts (unless you're doing this before the countdown starts, in which case The Narrator will comment on how Stanley wants to find additional information on the fate of his co-workers). If you head left, you'll reach a small staircase. Heading down the stairs, you can reach the left door at the bottom of the maintenance area from the original map (the one you reach during the first loop of the Confusion ending). The metal door normally can't be opened, but if you manage to get The Narrator to open it, you can reach the top catwalk of the monitor room like normal. If the countdown is active, you'll want to take the lift, which has been lowered to this level and can conveniently be used to reach the upper map, even though normally it can't be used in this way.

If you instead head up the stairs, you'll eventually reach the roof of the facility, where there's a type of aircraft. In most instances of the ending, this is a helicopter (it's the same model as the one from Half-Life 2, but with a more standard-looking paint job. Of course, there's nothing in the mock 'Source' file system to indicate this would exist in The Stanley Parable), but it can also be an old-style airplane (this airplane is present in another area of the game, as well). If you jump off the roof, you'll reach the Failure ending, where The Narrator comments on Stanley foolishly squandering his progress by trying to jump off the building. If you instead take the aircraft (using LCLICK or E), you will still die, achieving the Incompetent ending. If the countdown timer is active, Stanley's death will happen because you can't escape the facility in time. If it isn't active, The Narrator will instead comment on how Stanley can't pilot an airborne vehicle.

If, instead of turning left to take the stairs, you turned right, you can reach what appears to be an exit leading outside of the building. The door is left open, but when you enter it, it turns out it was a painting of a fake 'outside' drawn by The Narrator to mock you. If the countdown isn't active, this painting isn't there. Regardless, there will be a door into an office in the room with the painting; it's closed if the countdown is active. The office has a computer with it that Stanley can interact with. If the countdown isn't active, The Narrator claims that the computer has schematics of the building/details about the fate of the co-workers/technical information/proof/something along those lines. The precise wording depends on what he said when you entered the first door. If the Countdown is active and you manage to interact with the computer, it will spark chaotically like the terminals in the main countdown room. Neither of these results progress you towards an alternate ending, but if the countdown isn't active and you backtrack to get the Freedom ending, there will be dialogue changes. Additionally, the terminal can allude to the escape hatch upstairs with the helicopter, which can change the dialogue of the Failure and Incompetent endings.


	5. The Museum Ending, Narrative Echelons, and an Investigation into The Narrator and Curator

**5A - THE MUSEUM ENDING**

  1. Take the left door in the two doors room.
  2. Go up the stairs and through the boss's office.
  3. Go down the hallway marked 'ESCAPE'.



Straying off the Freedom ending before entering the Mind Control Facility, you will find a path labeled with 'ESCAPE'. This leads Stanley to a long hallway, where The Narrator warns him that he will die if he proceeds. True to The Narrator's warnings, he enters some sort of crushing conveyer belt; moments before dying, a second, female narrator, dubbed in this guide as The Curator, frees Stanley, leading us to a large 'THE STANLEY PARABLE' sign and then a museum with documentation about The Stanley Parable, its creation, creators, and various possible endings.

Eventually you will find a door marked with a green 'exit' sign. Heading this way leads to a second, curved 'THE STANLEY PARABLE' sign, along with a switch currently set to 'ON'. Clicking the switch doesn't flip it, but it does cut to black, and transports Stanley back to the crushing machine. This time, The Curator will plead _directly to the player_ to quit the game. The crushing machines will crush Stanley this time, but the game won't restart, forcing you to restart the game to continue.

**5B - NARRATIVE ECHELONS**

The fact that there's another entity out there with similar abilities to The Narrator leads us to several topics. The first that we will discuss here is Narrative Echelons. An echelon is just another word for a rank; it's used here because of how different endings can be 'ranked' depending on the game's own cognizance of their existence. The ranking is also indicative of how reliably the ending will play out, and how reliable The Narrator's dialogue is when replaying the ending (disregarding points where The Narrator often goes off script, like the boss's room and the start of the run).

ECHELON 1:

Freedom

This echelon contains endings that The Narrator is fully aware of and is part of his story; these endings have specific scripts that The Narrator sticks to. The Freedom ending is the single entry in this category, since it's the ending that occurs when you follow The Narrator's instructions. Deviation from the source dialogue is almost unheard of. This is the ending he expects you to pick, and the ending he is the most prepared for.

ECHELON 2:

Countdown, Museum, Zending, Apartment, Cold Feet, Powerful, Window, Coward, Mariella, Confusion, Disoriented, Escape, Serious, Heaven, Starvation

This echelon contains endings that The Curator or other entities (?) within The Stanley Parable are aware of; primarily, this involves endings referenced within the Museum ending. For these endings, The Narrator has some ideas about how to handle deviations, especially early on where the metaphorical tree of choices has few branches. He may also reference Echelon 2 endings in his dialogue, such as during the Real Person ending when he references the Apartment ending, but straying further out he will become less predictable.

ECHELON 3:

Games, Victory, Art, Leave, Void, Real Person, Potent, Incompetent, Failure, Demo, 128, Critic, Survive, Repetition, Alone, Hostile, Genocide, Hoarder, Trapped, Annoying

This echelon contains everything else, and it is completely freestyled by The Narrator; as a result, it makes the most use out of the game's ~ATH portions than other echelons. For the most part, this echelon can only be reached using exploits, glitches, or cheats, and The Narrator can act unpredictably even when performing the same choices. Additionally, Narrative Contradiction can be encountered during endings of this type.

There is ambiguity over placement in the rankings, and the definition of an echelon and the placement of endings within them is a source of endless debate in the community. For example, even though some endings, like the Zending and Apartment endings, are represented in the Museum, there are endings that are accessible with only one choice deviation from them (the Games and Real Person endings, respectively) that are not represented. In the Apartment ending, The Narrator also mentions The Adventure LineTM and the baby game, which are contained within the Confusion/Disoriented and Art endings, both of which The Narrator shouldn't have scripts for. This might just be him referencing _tools/environments_ that he has access to rather than actual endings, but it's ambiguous. The Real Person ending causes another issue, where The Narrator implies that the Apartment ending was scripted (his description OF that script is inaccurate, but his view that it is scripted is the point). If there is some indiscernible script The Narrator follows throughout other endings, it would move them to Echelon 1; it's even possible The Narrator has scripts for all of the endings in the museum. This would move every Echelon 2 entry to Echelon 1, except for the Confusion and Disoriented endings, which is in that category due to evidence from a different source material and which _we have explicit evidence_ vouching for the fact that The Narrator doesn't know about it. In fact, if The Narrator does have such a script, it would explain his knowledge of things such as the Countdown ending's bomb, and the Museum ending's death at the end of the corridor. The current status of each ending is debatable, and arguments can ping-pong schizophrenically in an endless loop. For the purposes of this guide, the _reliability of the run is the primary factor in rank placement_. Naturally, this will adhere to the progression of script -> some ideas -> major improvisations that The Narrator demonstrates for Echelon 1, 2, and 3 endings respectively.

**5C - JUST WHO IS THIS 'NARRATOR', ANYWAYS?**

In a game with so few characters, The Narrator takes a leading role, and now that The Curator has been introduced, it's a salient question to consider what, exactly, the properties of these two entities are. The current theory is that The Narrator, and perhaps The Curator as well, are Sentient A.I. living within the game, running using the ~ATH sections of code. While The Curator is more elusive, we can at least shed light on a few basic queries about The Narrator:

\- Is The Narrator a human?

Likely, **No.** The Broom Closet 'ending' indicates he is not human, as he refers to 'your' human vulnerabilities, rather than 'our'; additionally, a snippet of dialogue on their official YouTube channel compliments this: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bB4AR5Crb54&t=2m10s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bB4AR5Crb54&t=2m10s)

\- Is The Narrator Sentient or Cognizant?

Almost certainly **Yes and Yes.** The Narrator refers to The Stanley Parable and the fact that it's a video game often, i.e. in the Broom Closet 'ending' and in the Games ending. He is evidently aware that The Stanley Parable is a video game environment; he's also stated he wrote "the story" in the Confusion ending. All of this demonstrates Sentience. In addition to this, he also actively and dynamically responds to input from the player like a human would, so he isn't preprogrammed. This demonstrates Cognizance.

\- Does The Narrator know about the player?

**Inconclusive.** The Narrator almost never refers to the player; every time the player makes a choice, this choice is framed by The Narrator to be something Stanley did. The Narrator is patently aware that someone is behind a computer controlling Stanley, as he stated in the Broom Closet 'ending', but even after he believes this 'someone' has died and another person has taken their place, he refers to this person's choices as Stanley's.

\- Does The Narrator retain knowledge of past endings?

Almost certainly **Yes.** At the end of Zending and Confusion runs, The Narrator seems to forget the past ending. However, there's much more evidence for him retaining memories, as evidenced during the middle of the Confusion ending, where he remembers every restart. There's also the fact that he remembers if you've been in the Broom Closet before, and that he remembers if you've been in the boss's office before (occasionally, he opens the door to the lift as soon as you enter the office). Furthermore, if you play the Countdown ending twice, The Narrator relishes watching Stanley struggle again and again, and this is retained even after doing additional endings. Indeed, at the end of the Confusion and Zending runs, it appears more plausible that some other entity made the narrator forget. All of this is directly implied by reading the Blurbs in the Repetition and Survive endings; more on that in section 12C.

\- DID U GET THE BROOM CLOSET ENDING? THEB ROOM CLOSET ENDING WAS MY FAVRITE!1 XD

Yeah, OK, I mentioned the Broom Closet four times in a row, so, now's as good a time as any to rip this band-aid off. There is no Broom Closet ending in The Stanley Parable. Recall the definition of an ending listed in 2E:

'A discrete path through the game environment, leading to a restart.'

Getting to the Broom Closet is a discrete path, but it does not lead to a restart, since you can always leave the closet and go somewhere else. This applies to the Whiteboard ending, too.

\- Can The Narrator interact with the environment?

Almost certainly **Yes.** The Narrator closes doors behind Stanley and creates other barriers for him. He also causes story elements such as the countdown timer in the Countdown ending to occur. He has been shown to create entire environments, such as the baby game area, and it's implied that he created the game itself.

\- Can The Narrator interact with The Stanley Parable's source code/file system?

**Inconclusive.** Within the file system exists a file called gamescript.txt, believed to be where The Narrator gets the core dialogue of the Freedom ending, the ending that happens when you follow all of his instructions. There is no other file containing dialogue for the other routes, which is another reason the Freedom ending deserves its own Echelon. He has been shown to apply modifications to the game, which implies some ability to interact with things. Just like everything else, the game resets if you quit and reload, so The Narrator likely can't make permanent changes to the game, whereas an entity with true access to the file system would be able to.

If you're reading this coming from the "Doki Doki Literature Club!: Bugs, Glitches and Exploits for Dummies" guide, you'd be forgiven for drawing parallels between The Narrator and _another_ Sentient, Cognizant, game-manipulating entity from that game, Monika (or whichever Doki has the sentience attribute in your particular run of the game). The Stanley Parable doesn't have any emphasis on file manipulation, nor does it contain .chr files, but it certainly does contain significant portions of ~ATH code, despite the claim that the game was created using Source by Valve. It's entirely possible the two entities are similarly constructed. If you wait around in Act 3 of that game for long enough, the Doki with the Sentience attribute will integrate herself into the file system of DDLC, removing the need for a .chr file altogether and deleting herself. Perhaps The Narrator is similarly integrated into the file system.

The same questions, but for The Curator, go as follows:

\- Is The Curator a human?

**Inconclusive**. In any case, the idea that The Narrator and The Curator are _actual humans in reality_ is probably false, but if asking whether or not they _see themselves_ as humans similar to the characters in DDLC, the answer is unclear for The Curator.

\- Is The Curator Sentient or Cognizant?

Almost certainly **Yes and Inconclusive.** The Curator, if anything, is probably at least as Sentient as The Narrator, since she resides over an area that references the game's credits, and various other metaphysical facets of the game. Aside from that, she mentions the game and the menu system during the last part of the Museum ending, although The Narrator also does this during the Window ending. Variation in The Curator's dialogue has never been observed or recorded; she is either purposefully saying the same dialogue every time, or is truly a non-Cognizant entity.

\- Does The Curator know about the player?

Almost certainly **Yes**. 'You can still save these two. You can stop the program before they both fail.' The Narrator and Stanley are clearly the 'two' she is referring to, so the player must be the 'you'.

\- Does The Curator retain knowledge of past endings?

**Inconclusive.** The Curator only appears in the Museum ending. Repeating the ending doesn't yield different results.

\- DID U GET THE BROOM CLOSET ENDING? THEB ROOM CLOSET ENDING WAS MY FAVRITE!1 XD

Added this again to drive the point home. There's no Broom Closet ending. No Whiteboard ending, either. If I ever compile user-generated questions on this guide, I don't want people pestering me about it.

\- Can The Curator interact with the environment?

Likely **Yes.** There are three things that could be construed as The Curator interacting with the environment: she could have created the Museum, she could have released Stanley from the metal cage in the crusher, and she could have teleported Stanley from the ON/OFF switch back into the metal cage. Whether or not she actually did any of these things is unclear, but there's supporting evidence discussed in chapter 13 that The Curator was indeed the one to release Stanley from the metal cage.

\- Can The Curator interact with The Stanley Parable's source code/file system?

**Inconclusive.** There's no evidence for a 'yes' or a 'no' here. We just don't know enough about this character yet.

A lot of inconclusive results. There's a lot we don't know about The Curator, so, I'm leaving this chapter open to revisions as new information is released; major revisions will be noted in the Version History.


	6. The Games, Zending, and Art Endings: A Treasure Trove of Exploits

**6A - THE GAMES ENDING**

Perhaps no ending is as exploit-rich as the Games ending, which you can reach by doing the following:

  1. Take the right door in the two doors room.
  2. Avoid the maintenance section and enter the lift room.
  3. Take the lift and then jump from it onto the catwalk.
  4. Take the blue door (three times) in the red/blue doors room.
  5. Fail the baby game.



After entering the blue door three times, The Narrator will give up on trying to get Stanley under his control, and reveal that he hasn't built this section of the map yet. He then considers what Stanley would have wanted to see in The Stanley Parable, and asks Stanley to playtest some modifications to the game. The first modification can vary, but after playtesting a little, you will come across a room where you can rate the modification (from 1 to 5). Charting the probability of modifications yields the following:

x% - Location; change

68% - Two doors room; addition of a third door to the two doors room.

12% - Stanley's office; ability to open all doors.

9% - The lounge; much larger, with bathroom and several different vending machines.

5% - Stanley's office; windows show an actual environment rather than a white void.

3% - Stanley's office; ability to pick up objects.

2% - Two doors room; removal of the left door.

1% - Other: Stanley has a gun, a crowbar, can jump, and various other modifications.

Notably, the research into percentages was done independently by a few separate groups; one prominent group, #TeamStats, hails from the DDLC hacker community. Since runs in The Stanley Parable only take a few minutes, compiling statistical information such as that listed above is much easier; information in the rest of this guide was compiled using similar methods, with a few exceptions. If the modification starts the player in the two doors room, then there will be a second modification where The Narrator demonstrates a 'competitive leaderboard'. Either way, these modifications are vitally important. If you rate them as a 5, The Narrator will be pleased at his work, and the change will be retained throughout the rest of the run. Retaining the modification throughout subsequent playthroughs will be discussed in the next section, but it _is_ worth it. Sometimes.

After modification testing, The Narrator will show you the baby game, a game where you have to press a button to avoid a baby from reaching a dangerous fire. He tells you to play it for four hours; after two hours are up, he will add a second button, far away from the first, and a puppy being lowered into piranhas. If you don't invest the requisite four hours, The Narrator will become resigned to the fact that he can't provide you with an enjoyable experience, and he decides to load two alternate games. The games he loads have two themes. The first game will offer a lot of freedom and choices, while the second one will be linear. Both games will always come in a first person perspective; they will typically have some gameplay elements missing and no NPCs, with a few exceptions. The games he can pick are provided using the ~ATH sections of code, and are copied from an obscure, unhackable server. In cases where the game has a 'name' component, this will be set to Stanley by default. Charting the probability of modifications yields the following:

79% - Minecraft

This is the default if no other games can be found. Health, hunger, the inventory, sprinting, and the ability to break and place blocks is absent (as is jumping, of course). If you have the jump modification, you can explore the actual Minecraft world, which is the same every time. Once you descend into a cave, The Narrator gets bored at how open ended the game is, and then loads a different game.

14% - Halo: Combat Evolved

The role of Cortana is replaced with The Narrator, and you can't jump or use any weapons. The game starts during the second map, Halo, but The Narrator gets bored once you encounter Covenant forces and have no way to fight back, and then loads a different game.

4% - Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes

The Narrator takes the role of the bomb defusal expert, and seeing him react to successes or failures is actually quite fun. I suppose this falls under the 'choices' category because there are a lot of different ways to interact with the bomb?

2% - The Stanley Parable Demonstration

In this case, instead of being resigned to the fact that he can't provide you with a good experience, The Narrator will load the demonstration to try and convince you of the quality of The Stanley Parable. This is a separate ending entirely, and will end differently, without proceeding to a second game.

1% - Others, including Firewatch

In the case of Firewatch, the role of Delilah is replaced with The Narrator, and the game starts after the backstory section.

Game 2 leads to the end of the Games ending, and can end in a variety of ways, depending on the game:

90% - Portal

This is the default if no other games can be found. As always, jumping is disabled, and GLaDOS is replaced with The Narrator. There actually are objects in this place you can interact with, such as the radio, mug, clipboard, and the cube in the test chamber. After completing the puzzle, The Narrator will preemptively raise the elevator, trapping Stanley in the first test chamber. If you jump down the elevator shaft, you'll find a peculiar area with half-built prototypes of Stanley's office and tarps covering scaffolding. Jumping down further leads you to the original Stanley Parable mod, which you can explore for a bit. After finding the old room #427 and leaving, The Narrator will blank out the screen, with a variety of dialogue options, often talking about his role in the game. The game then restarts.

6% - Please Don't Touch Anything 3D

Please Don't Touch Anything 3D has been stylized as though it were in The Stanley Parable. The game starts after the NPC goes to the bathroom, so he isn't present. The Narrator will leave you after you achieve one ending; unfortunately, the restart button on the panel restarts The Stanley Parable, so you'll start a new run. Unlike the actual 3D version, which is meant to be played using VR, Stanley can move around. There's also a door here, which leads to a backroom section of the same tarps/scaffolding zone that Portal leads to.

2% - Desert Bus

The game is fully functional, but this obviously can't be exploited in any way. The Narrator decides he is tired of watching you stumble around, and simply leaves you to play Desert Bus forever. The Narrator doesn't say anything if you manage to get a point; maxing out the score system would require 99 points, and is beyond the capability of testers at the moment.

1% - Others, including Doki Doki Literature Club! and Duck Hunt

Yes, DDLC is in this game, because just when you thought The Stanley Parable had reached the rock bottom of metaphysical storytelling, it pulls out an anime sword blessed with the power of four cute VN girls and slices all the way to the other side of the earth. Or, I guess, in this case, Japan. Despite being a visual novel with many choices, it appears this falls under the 'linear' category because it's a two dimensional game; Stanley is still technically in a game _environment,_ and as a result, the camera is locked and he is placed in an invisible box where he can't move. The game is fully functional, and this can be exploited in many ways. The primary difference is that sections of dialogue that are normally spoken by your self-insert and DDLC's narrator are both spoken by The Narrator, while Sayori, Natsuki, Yuri, and Monika's dialogue remains in their pink speech boxes, without an audio component. It's a weird dissonance between two very different games. After the first day, The Narrator will state he doesn't care much to see you trying to court anime waifus, and leaves, breaking the game's script and forcing you to restart. More on the topic of DDLC can be found in a future chapter; there is a LOT to say about it, as well as the other games. Incidentally, Duck Hunt is also fully functional, and The Narrator abandons his formal tone for a while, watching you play. This jovial tune wears off eventually, and you're forced to restart.

Notably, some of the titles listed above were released _after_ The Stanley Parable's October 2013 release date. This dilemma was only recently resolved, but for a while there were two competing theories to explain this. The first theory was that time travel via ~ATH is involved, and that the unhackable server downloads other games from the future. This could be true, but there's currently no evidence for this, seeing as there's no evidence of DDLC, Please Don't Touch Anything 3D, or Firewatch at any time before their release dates. This would also imply that games that haven't been released yet would be playable now, and this isn't the case. The second, and more mundane, explanation was that the server holding these games was updated at some point after each game came out, and so, if you were to play a copy of the game back in 2013, the instances of games from a later date simply wouldn't exist.

As it turns out, both explanations are true, sort of. The second explanation is true, but rather than being updated by a developer/The Narrator, the directory of The Stanley Parable has an actual, static list of games that are allowed to spawn in this ending. The game presumably updates the server as games on the list are released, and this server presumably downloads the game from the internet and distributes it to instances of The Stanley Parable, where the probability table is then updated according to The Narrator or some other unknown means. The list contains games that haven't been released yet (a notable entry in this list is the Portrait of Markov, but it's possible this was included as a redundancy rather than a guarantee, since it's not even certain that Portrait will be released/is a first person game/is something The Narrator would consciously choose as a game) but a large amount of the entries in the list (12 out of the 18 entries listed) are encrypted, so the full catalogue of games remains to be seen.

**6B - THE ART ENDING**

  1. Take the right door in the two doors room.
  2. Avoid the maintenance section and enter the lift room.
  3. Take the lift and then jump from it onto the catwalk.
  4. Take the blue door (three times) in the red/blue doors room.
  5. Succeed in the baby game for four excruciating hours.



If you manage to, through sheer force of will, playtest the baby game for a mind-melting four hours, you'll get the Art ending, where 'the essence of divine art' will applaud your effort while you stand in a white void. Unfortunately, even if you were inclined to code something that would move Stanley between the two buttons and push them, ~ATH will recognize if you're trying to cheat the system, automatically failing your run by preventing the mouse input from registering. This is quite buggy, and there are instances in which this check fails. The Narrator and the check are independent of each other, since he'll comment on a preprogrammed path by stating something along the lines of 'I hope you aren't using a program to cheat the game into pressing the button'.

The Art ending is critical for modification exploits. If you rate a modification as 5 and then achieve the Art ending, The Narrator himself will applaud your effort after restarting. He then gifts you with the in-and-of-itself mind-melting ability to _retain the modification permanently throughout all subsequent playthroughs._ If you return to the Games ending, the active modification(s) will be removed from the probability table, allowing you to add another modification more easily. More information about exploiting this can be found in chapter 8.

**6C - THE ZENDING ENDING**

Or, I guess, just THE ZENDING. That wouldn't conform to my subchapter naming schema, though. RIP.

  1. Take the right door in the two doors room.
  2. Avoid the maintenance section and enter the lift room.
  3. Take the lift and then jump from it onto the catwalk.
  4. Take the red door in the red/blue doors room.



If you take the red door instead of the blue door, you'll enter a repeating square loop with one door in it. The door opens after The Narrator discusses how he's always had your best interests at heart, and that it's the game's choices that are causing conflict.

This door takes Stanley to a new map, with some, I guess mildly impressive sci-fi space effects. The Narrator seems to really like this room; if you try and leave through the only door here (the door you came from surreptitiously vanishes after you step through it), you'll come across a staircase leading to a ledge to jump off of.

At this point, you can restart, but to see all The Narrator's reactions, you'll have to climb up the stairs and jump four times, with Stanley becoming progressively slower and more damaged each time. The Narrator will plead painfully for Stanley to stop; his exact words vary, but he will, under normal circumstances, always play the victim. Despite his apparent power over the game environment, he also _doesn't do anything to stop Stanley_ , which is especially curious, given that he removed the door Stanley came from from _this very map._ This anomalous behavior and other Narrator-questionable zones will be discussed later.


	7. The Stanley Parable Demonstration, and The Demo Ending

**7A - THE STANLEY PARABLE DEMONSTRATION**

The demo version of The Stanley Parable contains several new areas, and it's free to download off Steam. The Narrator in this version of the game isn't Cognizant, although the developers made sure to make him respond to various things as though he was. Although analysis of The Stanley Parable's ~ATH section is in its infancy, it is apparent that The Stanley Parable Demonstration contains no ~ATH code, and is instead a purely linear, classically programmed C++ first-person narrative. If you play through this demo, you won't be able to play through the Demo ending in the main game, which I'll discuss in the next section.

As a summary, the demonstration proceeds as follows. You start in a parking garage-like area, and proceed to a waiting room, where your number is 28. The number displayed in the room is 16, but whether or not you wait for the number to tick up to 28 is irrelevant; once you pass the waiting room, you'll enter into a green lounge-like area filled with television screens, where The Narrator will greet you and try and raise your anticipation. First, he asks you to stand still for 20 minutes; regardless of if you decide to invest the time, he'll give you a tour of the demo construction facility to whet your appetite.

The tour has several rooms, listed below:

'Buttons & Choice'. A room with 112 red buttons; whichever one you pick, The Narrator will state that 94% of the people that chose that button are perverts. You must go through this room to reach the bottom of the facility.

'Emotion Booths'. A room with 'emotion booths' that The Narrator claims to be able to make you feel a certain emotion. 'Despair' and 'Discovery' are the ones that are open, as well as a 'Secret' booth. There's also 'Happiness', 'Courage', 'Confusion', and 'Embarrassment', but these are all closed.

'Compliments'. A room of compliments, with an upside-down smiley face plastered on a button. The Narrator runs out of compliments after only two.

'Wall Technology'. A room with a brick wall in it, which The Narrator claims to be a wall you can walk through. It's solid, for now.

'Demo Status'. A room with a large sign inside it; the sign is supposed to light up if you are inside the demonstration. It's currently off.

'Final Choice'. A room with a long catwalk, a Demo Status sign, and two buttons, 'Yes' and 'No', meant for the player to give feedback on if the demo was effective.

After heading to the exit door inside the Final Choice room, you'll be led back to the green room, where The Narrator will discuss safety concerns. A list of these concerns will be in the next section, because they will be relevant there. In the case of the demo proper, though, these safety concerns won't happen (unless you've played through the next section, in which case, you should probably stop playing The Stanley Parable Demonstration).

The Narrator instructs you to press the large, red 'Disagree' button if you take offence to these risks, but the button is in a different section of the game, and managing to get there using cheats doesn't yield anything different, so, unfortunately, this isn't relevant right now. The Narrator also instructs you to perform a dance that he'll be able to track if you experience any symptoms. Then, he tries to lead you to the demonstration, which brings you back to the door after the parking garage. Going back to the green room and trying again, you'll reach a room with a button labeled with an 8, which states the word 'eight' when you press it. The Narrator exclaims that this is horribly wrong, and that this button is nowhere in the main game; he then leads you back to the parking garage, where he accuses you of tampering with the demonstration somehow. He tells you to reflect on your lack of respect for demo-taking, and then, when he tries to get you to do the demo again, it leads to a room with signs stating that the demo is over.

From this room, The Narrator leads you to a brown warehouse-like environment, where, in the process of trying to find something for you to do, he asks you to place a mug in a bin. This mug is interactable, like the items in the Portal section of the Games ending. After you do this, he'll ask for user input on if you're enjoying the demo, which will always yield a positive result regardless of your choice.

After going past a hallway with the disagree button, you'll reach the Final Choice room again, but the buttons won't work because according to the demo status sign, you're still in the demo. The Narrator will then lead you back to the factory area, where Narrative Contradiction (not true Narrative Contradiction, but, a topic for a later section) has rendered the area in a state of pandemonium. The Narrator leads you into a room, previously locked, with an 'Isolation Chamber'. Inside the chamber, he then states the following:

He's fed up with The Stanley Parable.

He doubts any of this is in the main game.

He is dissatisfied with how many 'endings' there are in the game.

He would prefer a game with beginnings instead of endings.

He them reminisces about areas of the demo, but also about areas of the main game than we, the demo-taker, haven't been to, _including areas of the main game classified as backroom/Echelon 3 zones._ This ends with the demo-taker in Stanley's office, and exiting to the main office area ends the demo.

**7B - THE DEMO ENDING**

This occurs on the slim chance that, while progressing through the Games ending, you got The Stanley Parable Demonstration as your first game. I say 'off chance', because, as it turns out, if you've played a full playthrough of The Stanley Parable Demonstration, then the probability of getting this as your game 1 will be 0% (the other games distribute their probabilities proportionally); the same result occurs after playing through this ending once. Chalk it up to ~ATH magic and let's move on to what happens and how this differs from the demo proper.

You'll start in the same position as the demo, but The Narrator will be with you from the start. When you reach the green room, The Narrator skips directly to the safety concerns, since he doesn't feel the need to tease your anticipation (you're coming from the Games ending so he doesn't think you have any right now).

_\- WARNING -_

_THE SIDE EFFECTS THAT THE NARRATOR LISTS FOR DEMONSTRATION PARTICIPATION **DO APPLY** FOR THE VERSION OF THE DEMONSTRATION IN THE STANLEY PARABLE, AND IF YOU PARTICIPATE IN THE DEMONSTRATION, ONE OR MORE SYMPTOMS **WILL** HAPPEN TO YOU._

I'm going to make another chapter on side effect exploits and precautions, and I'll post a list of every side effect there. It's a very taboo subject, so I highly recommend you _do not_ play along at home.

Next, The Narrator mentions the disagree button, which is conveniently propped against a couch in the green room this time around, instead of being in an entirely separate section of the building. If you press it, The Narrator will "assume responsibility for side effects that you experience while playing the game". Regardless of your choice, he'll move on to the dance perimeter, where you should perform a dance. _If you're playing through the demonstration, I highly recommend performing a dance that's simple and doesn't obstruct gameplay, such as a single sideways strafe using A or D, or moving backwards using S._ In this version of the demonstration, performing the dance will alert The Narrator that something has gone wrong, and he will _quit the application immediately_. This won't insulate you from everything, but it is helpful in some circumstances.

Moving on, The Narrator will attempt to show you the demo, but ends up leading you back to the waiting room, and then to the eight-game room, just like before. True to the word of The Narrator from the demo proper, there's no eight button here. In fact, The Narrator will comment on how, in the demo proper, there _was_ an eight-game button here, but it isn't here anymore because this isn't the demo proper, it's the main game. He is also under the impression that the demonstration was fixed at some point in the past, and that there should be an actual demonstration somewhere here.

This leads to a few interesting digressions. Did The Narrator play the actual demonstration at some point in the past? If so, who did he play it with? You can replay the real demonstration program as many times as you like, but playing it even once means that you can't reach the Demo ending in The Stanley Parable proper. This _has to mean_ that The Narrator has played the demonstration with at least one other person. Alternatively, is it possible that all Narrators between all game sessions are linked somehow?

Another possibility is that, during creation of The Stanley Parable proper, The Narrator was 'initialized' by an unknown player playing The Stanley Parable Demonstration, but with the necessary code serving as 'memories' to transfer over to the main game. If the theory is true, there might be leftover code serving as a nexus point between this 'memory' file and the rest of the program. If an answer to this is found, it and possible ramifications may warrant their own chapter sometime in the future.

In any case, after the eight-game room, The Narrator will lead Stanley back to the green room and deviate from his normal pattern, leading Stanley into the demo construction facility. At this point, The Narrator is usually suspicious of something, and requests Stanley check on the demo status button. All of the other rooms in the tour can be checked, and The Narrator will humor Stanley to try and convince him of the value of The Stanley Parable. The tour rooms contain interesting differences from their demo proper counterparts:

'Buttons & Choice'. The Narrator has different, oddly specific statistics relating to each button. These statistics are _somewhat_ consistent on each run, but they do change sometimes; it's possible that the statistics are accurate and are tracked somehow. It's unknown if it includes statistics from the demo proper. ~ATH magic, let's move on.

'Emotion Booths'. This is a weird one. The booths cause the stated emotion to happen to you, the player, which is apparently something ~ATH can do. If you return with the 'open doors' modification (which, by the way, you don't need to burn through four hours getting because the Demo ending is on an offshoot of the Games ending), you can open 'Happiness', 'Courage', 'Confusion', and 'Embarrassment'. If you're eyeing the Happiness booth with anticipation, you should probably stay away from it. There's something called Status that prevents you from staying inside forever, so the booth messes with people psychologically by forcing them to restart to try and get back to this point over and over again.

'Compliments'. The Narrator takes a long, long time to run out of compliments. His compliments do get more esoteric over time, but he puts in genuine effort, and they change from person to person, depending on the actual circumstances of you and your life. More ~ATH magic.

'Wall Technology'. This room is the same.

'Demo Status'. The demo status sign is lit up. This puts The Narrator at ease. He then goes on a long soliloquy about his past experience running the demonstration, and how he now realizes that the entire facility is part of the demonstration; this is all, again, a huge metaphorical blinking neon sign pointing towards the conclusion that The Narrator remembers the demonstration from an earlier run. The Narrator then opens the Final Choice room, leading us to:

'Final Choice'. If you choose yes, The Narrator will rejoice at the fact he was able to convince you of the value of the game, and then he restarts the game, ready for you to make different choices. If you say no, he will act despondent, state a few things about how he failed to make the experience enriching for you, and then leaves you to restart or quit the game yourself.

As long as you restart the game before entering your Final Choice, you can still return to the Demo ending. There is one major deviation to the ending worth discussing; there's a possibility that The Narrator will believe you did something to prevent the demo from being fixed like he expected. If this is the case, he won’t tell you to check on the 'Demo Status' room. Instead, he'll lead you to the 'THE END' room, the room with the cup, and to the 'Final Choice' just like in the demo proper. His dialogue isn't the same as in the demo, but it follows similar beats narratively. When you reach the 'Final Choice' room, he'll notice that the 'Demo Status' button here is on, and have the same realization as in the normal ending.

There's another exploit involving the circular chamber you're supposed to go into at the end of the demo, but that's a topic for another time.


	8. Modification Exploits and A Mess of New Endings

**8A - MODIFICATION EXPLOITS**

Before getting into modification exploits, I will offer a disclaimer here that we won't be discussing the 'open all doors' exploit in depth. This exploit, in and of itself, opens up so many new options that discussing them all here would be confusing and impossible. For the most part, I'll shunt the responsibility of discussing that to a future section detailing backroom areas.

I also won't go over the lounge and object manipulation modifications, because those are better served in their own sections, and I won't outline every single possibility you can reach using modifications, because if I did, this section would be eighty pages long. For the most part, I'll cover special cases, give a few specific examples, or explain offshoots of previously covered endings.

As a refresher, modifications can be attained by going through the Art ending; you must rate the modification The Narrator applies as a '5', and then finish the baby game for the modification to be applied across subsequent runs. I've also reposted the probability table here for convenience.

x% - Location; change

68% - Two doors room; addition of a third door to the two doors room.

12% - Stanley's office; ability to open all doors.

9% - The lounge; much larger, with bathroom and several different vending machines.

5% - Stanley's office; windows show an actual environment rather than a white void.

3% - Stanley's office; ability to pick up objects.

2% - Two doors room; removal of the left door.

1% - Other: Stanley has a gun, a crowbar, can jump, and various other modifications.

**8B - THE GENOCIDE ENDING**

Having a gun or a crowbar is a rare modification, but it yields some interesting results. RCLICK typically doesn't do anything, but you can attack with a weapon if you're holding one using it. If you have multiple weapons, you can switch between them using 1, 2, 3, etcetera. These controls will also appear in the options menu once you unlock weapons. Doors can't be destroyed, nor are there any creatures to kill, but plenty of things within the game environment can be damaged, such as the glass windows within the office. It seems like The Stanley Parable makes a point to save destruction done to the environment, even if this damage is superficial and doesn't actually matter. This persists if you leave and reload a map, but not after a restart. Before you go gunning down everything in sight for the sake of science, though, there is one notable thing to know. _If you destroy Stanley's computer, this will cause ~ATH to fry the computer you run the game on._ This happened to me while I was experimenting, so please proceed with caution. In fact, you should probably back up your files, or run the game on a computer you're fine with exploding, just to be safe.

The Narrator responds to Stanley destroying objects in various ways, such as by commenting on his 'primal, senseless vandalism spree', or by narrating that 'Stanley was taking out the frustration of being alone in his office on every little thing in sight.' Objects that spark and sputter when destroyed, such as electronics, are more likely to yield a response from him. Destroying things in pleasant-looking areas, such as the lounge, or the boss's office, also yields unique dialogue. He may also comment on how Stanley will probably be fired when his co-workers return. Destroying electronics critical to the storyline yields more interesting results, but unfortunately, The Narrator is quite good at keep the storyline on track. Here's some examples:

  1. Destroying the boss's keypad.



Just like if you wait around without doing anything in this room, The Narrator will state that the panel's 'emergency override' kicks in, opening the door.

  1. Destroying the elevator button past the boss's office.



The Narrator will usually say something deprecating to Stanley, but he'll reveal that Stanley knows of another elevator in the office, and that he could prod around to try and discover the boss's secret by using this elevator. The elevator in question is the one in the maintenance section, which The Narrator will make you backtrack to. After descending, The Narrator will (in most cases; this room confuses him sometimes) open the metal shutters and lead you to the monitor room. You would think that the Confusion ending would then play out, but that ending only happened because, narratively, Stanley had no reason to suspect something sinister was going on in his office. In this version of events, Stanley has already witnessed the suspicious keypad in his boss's office, and the monitor room was going to be the next major area he explored anyways. As a result, The Narrator's dialogue plays out similarly to the monitor room dialogue during the Freedom/Countdown path. After viewing this, The Narrator leads you to the 'left' door in the bottom maintenance section, where, if you recall from section 4C, you'll be able to reach the countdown room and proceed with the Freedom/Countdown endings normally.

  1. Destroying the elevator button past the boss's office, and the one in the maintenance section.



The Narrator will reveal the existence of yet another way down; he then leads you to room 425 (the room that The Adventure LineTM uses in the Confusion ending), where you then have to follow what would be the path the Adventure LineTM takes until reaching the stairs. If you take the stairs down, you'll see that they link to the 'right' door at the bottom of the maintenance section (where you would have gone if you'd taken the lift down). Incidentally, taking the stairs down triggers a loading sequence, as you would expect it to, since the monitor room map and the office map are different. Anyways, deviation #2 then plays out.

If you instead head upstairs, you can reach the rest of the Confusion ending office section; you can loop all the way back to the starting office this way, which will be relevant in #8.

  1. Destroying the lift at the very end of the monitor room.



The Narrator will get you to backtrack to the start of the monitor room map and tell you to head back up to the boss's office. The downwards pointing arrow on the starting elevator has also been surreptitiously flipped while you were in the monitor room. Deviation #2 plays out like normal, except that The Narrator skips past the metal shutters revealing the monitor room (or if he gets confused, he just leads you backwards and opens the 'left' door anyways).

  1. Destroying the lift at the very end of the monitor room, and then the lift at the start of the map that leads back to the boss's office.



The Narrator will, surprisingly, get fed up with you and state that your only remaining path is to die at the end of the escape hallway (aka, the Museum ending). The Leave ending is still a viable route, though, so you may choose between the two.

  1. Destroying the ON/OFF console in the power room.



Everything goes dark, and The Narrator will adjust the Freedom ending dialogue superficially to make it seem as if you've pressed the 'OFF' button. This is one of the rare cases where you can get a deviation in the Freedom ending's script.

  1. Destroying the rating system buttons during the Games ending.



The Narrator will interpret it as disliking the modification. You can also destroy the baby, the dog, or the buttons in the baby game, and The Narrator will become even more angry and hurt than he normally is. Someone a while back had the idea to destroy the piranha tank to avoid having to keep pressing the dog's button, but, unfortunately, it's made of the same material as the surrounding walls rather than glass or anything else, so this isn't breakable. Don't worry, we'll get to the deviations that occur if you bring a gun into other games.

  1. Destroying the lift at the very end of the monitor room, all the monitors in the monitor room, and the lift in the boss's office after using it to head up. Also, destroying the boss's keypad, the maintenance lift, the ON/OFF console, and damaging most of the filing cabinets within the 'Employee 432 Peer Reviews' section, plus The Narrator's fern.



This is how you get the so-called 'Genocide' ending of the game. You'll need the gun modification to do this, since you can't reach the monitors with the crowbar (thankfully, the SMG-type weapon that you get doesn't have a bullet counter). You have to start doing the Freedom ending, but destroy everything on your way there, and then instead of going up the lift, you have to destroy it and turn back as far as possible until The Narrator is forced to direct you down the Confusion ending stairs. You have to make a loop around the office before heading downstairs; while in the Employee 432 Peer Review section, remember to shoot as many filing cabinets as you can, including the ones through the glass windows. Once you get to the countdown room, make sure to destroy both huge countdown monitors, as well as all of the machinery in here. This is dubbed the 'Genocide' ending and yields the most significant deviation from The Narrator's Freedom ending script; he'll make something up about how Stanley's destructive tendencies were, in the long run, constructive by preventing this machine from being used on anyone else.

**8C - JUMPING, THE 128/POTENT ENDINGS, AND LETTING THE NARRATOR KNOW HOW YOU REALLY FEEL ABOUT THE BABY GAME (THE CRITIC ENDING)**

Wow, I spent way too much time talking about breakable objects.

Anyways, jumping opens up a menagerie of new paths. Stanley's jump height is approximately 43 in game 'units', the same as Chell's jump height from Portal 2. For context, it's slightly more than one Aperture Science Weighted Storage Cube worth of height (36.1 units, thanks to CreativityTheEmotion for help with measuring). Unfortunately, crouch-jumping doesn't yield a higher jump height, unlike in other Source games. If you're familiar with Source, .bsp map files from The Stanley Parable can be converted into .vmf files and loaded into the Hammer editor for measuring purposes. These maps are consistent with the unpopulated 'white void' environment seen via noclip, and there are parts of The Stanley Parable that aren't in _any_ map file, so it's another case of The Stanley Parable trying to avoid scrutiny by passing itself off as a Source game. 

You can combine jumping and crouching to exit the office via most windows, since there isn't actually glass there to stop you, but The Narrator will usually spit out the same Window ending dialogue. If you have the 'real environment' modification on, then climbing out of windows will usually yield one of two things; a variant of the Failure ending without notes about your progress, or a variant of the Leave ending if the fall is small enough. The Narrator's dialogue varies, similar to how it varies during the start of runs right after you leave room #427. Sometimes he'll remark that 'Stanley realized it was a weekend; he was so embarrassed at his faux pas that he promptly left the office using the nearest available exit/promptly committed suicide'.

Stanley's office is around three stories tall (where you start out), although his office displays non-Euclidian behavior, so assigning anything consistent isn't possible right now. An easy place to observe this is in the two doors room, since the windows on the back wall should lead directly to a meeting room and room 415, but it looks like a clear day outside with no obstructions. Anyways, if you break the glass from interior windows, you can climb through those, as well, but this usually leads to nowhere and yields a sarcastic remark from The Narrator. There are some cases where you can enter backroom zones, such as entering 'room' 424 from the alternate start 'Notes' room, or entering the adjacent room in the second part of the starting area.

The railings in the Games/Art path are short enough to be jumped, so you can fall all the way down to the bottom of the large 'Please Rate Your Experience' room. This is known colloquially as the 128 ending (naming every ending may be a lost cause, to be honest). At this point, the game is firmly off the rails, so The Narrator can do any number of things. The most common response he has is to shine a light down in this room, illuminating your current position, and then teleport you back to the platform after letting you know there's nothing down there. If you jump off again, The Narrator will state that he's 'OK with leaving you down there, with nothing but dull, 128 by 128 floor panels to keep you company,' and then he'll illuminate the entire room for you and leave, forcing you to restart.

Now, there's one more use of jumping in the Games/Art path that you can do, known as the Critic ending. This is one of my personal favorites. If you jump off the railing in the baby game, you can actually _kill yourself using the fire in the room_. The Narrator interprets this as meaning you would rather kill yourself than play the baby game, and he is so mortified that he _completely removes this section of the run_. This means you can't get the Art ending on subsequent runs, nor can you get additional modifications by completing the baby game additional times. Obviously, the change isn't permanent, and it'll reset if you quit the game.

You can also branch out from the Freedom/Countdown endings to get the Potent ending (these ending names are all colloquial at this point). If you jump off the railing in the power room or before the monitor room, you'll die from fall damage, leading The Narrator to make something up about how the narrative potency of the situation was too much for Stanley to take. He'll usually offer a snide remark at some point, too, mocking Stanley's lack of will or nervous energy or something.

Unfortunately, some railings, like the ones in the monitor room, are just too high to be jumped over. For these, object manipulation is usually required.

**8D - THREE DOORS, ONE DOOR  
  
**

If you added a third door, you'll be disappointed to learn that this door leads directly into the Confusion ending zone of the office. The open door and jump/attack exploits are more useful and also allow you to do this, so it's kind of a waste of time to play the baby game for this exploit. Anyways, you have to take a maintenance corridor and you'll exit via door 4B4, which is right near the normal Adventure LineTM entrance (door 425). The Narrator wants you to go down the stairs nearby so you'll reach the lower part of the maintenance section, where you can ascend the maintenance lift and find the meeting room. He may end up accidentally triggering the Confusion ending using this path, although this is uncommon. If you go upstairs, instead, you'll have the choice of heading all the way back to the start of the office, or you can follow a different path and end up opening the door near the top of the staircase leading to the boss's office. All three of these just re-route you back to normal endings; The Narrator is usually pretty good at finding ways back to his preferred route, the Freedom ending.

If you chose the 'removal of a door' option, The Narrator will remove the left door, and this won't cause problems. He simply won't say anything when you reach the two doors room anymore, and the true choice between routes will be after the lounge, when you have to choose between the maintenance section and the lift room. If you play through the Real Person ending, this will also awkwardly change where The Narrator tells you to make a choice. Playing through the Real Person ending with three doors is a topic better discussed when I talk about that ending in depth, since Narrative Contradiction is a topic that shouldn't be rushed.


	9. Demo Side Effects and Exploits

**9A - DEMO SIDE EFFECTS: SAFETY FIRST**

I have to post another warning here, because side effect exploits are a particularly taboo subject within the community. I don't want to be responsible for anyone coming to harm, but if I refused to list any information about this topic after I teased it in chapter 7, it might only tempt your curiosity. Also, I would be leaving out an important aspect of the game. Regardless, side effects are not for the Common Stanley, so I encourage you to read this chapter only for informative purposes, rather than for instruction. I have also posted the full list of side effects from the game below; additionally, I've added current information about each one, confirmation about whether or not they've been encountered before, and potential survivability.

_\- WARNING -_

_ONE OR MORE OF THE FOLLOWING SIDE EFFECTS WILL AFFECT YOU IF YOU DECIDE TO PARTICIPATE IN THE DEMO ENDING OF THE STANLEY PARABLE. IF YOU PARTICIPATE IN THE DEMONSTRATION, ONE OR MORE SYMPTOMS **WILL** HAPPEN TO YOU._

SCREAMING AND YELLING INSTANTLY, NEVER STOPPING EVER AND SHRIEKING AND GROWLING AND GENERALLY BEING A DICK

**Unconfirmed.**

BEING ON THE SUN

**Confirmed. Unsurvivable.** From a bystander's point of view, you'll teleport from your seat somewhere else. This doesn't cause any kind of damage or pressure wave of death on the bystander's end, but they should know not to use the disagree/dance method to bring your corpse back, since it'll expose them to your charred body as well as pockets of ultra-light solar plasma that _can_ cause the aforementioned pressure waves of death, especially up close. (Details on the 'disagree/dance' method coming up).

BECOMING THE SUN

**Unconfirmed.** General consensus is that this one teleports you to the sun as well, since this appears to be what happens to Stanley, and if it actually meant that you _turn into the sun_ , we would all be dead; there's no way to test this theory right now, so we can't pin a firm 'Yes' to it. The two sun effects are the most dangerous, so I've elaborated on them below.

PASSING THE TIME DAY AFTER DAY WITH MENIAL DISTRACTIONS WHILE YOUR AGING BODY SLOWLY DECAYS AND INCHES IT'S WAY TOWARD DEATH

**Unconfirmed.**

DEPRESSION

**Confirmed. Survivable.** Can cause suicidal tendencies.

ACCEPTANCE

**Confirmed. Safe.**

THINKING IT'S TUESDAY WHEN IT'S WEDNESDAY

**Confirmed. Safe.**

ROCK SOLID ABS

**Confirmed. Safe.**

EMOTIONS

**Unconfirmed.**

PUNCTUATING EVERYTHING YOU SAY WITH CLAPPING

**Confirmed. Safe.**

TEACHING CHEMISTRY

**Unconfirmed.**

LOSING ALL OF YOUR EARTHLY POSSESSIONS BUT GAINING ETERNAL ENLIGHTENMENT

**Unconfirmed.**

FEELING UPSET WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO LOVED ONES

**Unconfirmed.**

HAVING MORE EYES

**Confirmed. Safe.**

GIVING UP SOUP FOREVER

**Confirmed. Safe.**

STANDING IN A LARGE GREEN ROOM LOOKING AT A LIST OF SIDE EFFECTS

**Unconfirmed.**

STANDING UP FOR YOUR BELIEFS

**Unconfirmed.**

STANDING STILL

**Confirmed. Survivable.** Might be difficult to function normally if you get this one; the only player who got this was wise enough to use the disagree/dance method to revert the change.

ONLY MOVING YOUR FEET!?!?!?!?!

**Confirmed. Survivable.** This one causes cardiac arrest, probably because it stops involuntary movement such as your heartbeat. The disagree/dance method doesn't bring you back to life, but you can subsequently be resuscitated using a defibrillator.

INCORRECT USE OF PUNCTUATION

**Confirmed. Safe.**

UNDERSTANDING EXACTLY WHAT THIS GAME IS AND HOW IT PLAYS AND WHAT YOU DO AND HOW YOU WIN AND THEN DELETING IT OFF YOUR HARD DRIVE AND DOING SOMETHING ELSE

**Confirmed. Unknown Safety Rating.** To my knowledge, this one has been documented exactly once, by someone with a roommate who played the Demo ending. Unfortunately, the person also got the Only Moving Your Feet side effect a few hours later and wasn't revived in time, so we couldn't get any useful information from them.

PLAYING A VIDEO GAME WONDERING 'WHO?'

**Unconfirmed.**

NOT WONDERING 'WHO?'

**Unconfirmed.**

NOT PLAYING A VIDEO GAME

**Confirmed. Safe.** You'll know if this happens if a video game you're playing inexplicably quits.

THE ABILITY TO SMELL FEAR

**Confirmed. Safe.**

THINKING YOU HAVE THE ABILITY TO SMELL FEAR

**Confirmed. Safe.** Both this and the one above have happened, and trials were run by the community to confirm which is which using two people who had been affected with each one.

BEING BETTER THAN OTHER PEOPLE

**Unconfirmed.** People like to say they've been affected with this one as a goof, but there's no clear way to run an objective test on it.

LOVING YOURSELF JUST THE WAY YOU ARE

**Confirmed. Safe.**

NOT EXPERIENCING SIDE EFFECTS

**Confirmed. Safe.** If you get this one you won't receive any effects, even if you were supposed to receive multiple ones.

TURNING THAT FROWN ALL THE WAY DOWN

**Confirmed. Survivable.** This breaks the player's jaw and cheekbones. The disagree/dance method reverts the change nicely.

NOT PLAYING A DEMO

**Confirmed. Safe.** Quits The Stanley Parable Demonstration if you're playing that; this also happens if you're playing the Demo ending.

REPEATING YOURSELF

**Confirmed. Safe.**

NOT PLAYING A DEMO

**Confirmed. Safe.** I'm pasting repeat entries for posterity's sake, since this is how the list is presented in the game.

REPEATING YOURSELF

**Confirmed. Safe.**

LOCKED IN BITTER STRUGGLE WITH YOUR ALTER IDENTITY

**Confirmed. Survivable.** Probably the weirdest one. This will create a clone of yourself in real life. The clone has your personality, so they might not have any reason to fight you or cause you any trouble. This side effect has only been documented twice, and in both cases the clone inexplicably died soon afterwards (one in a car crash, the other in a household fire) so more information is needed.

REPEATING YOURSELF

**Confirmed. Safe.**

BEING SPIDERS

**Confirmed. Survivable.** The disagree/dance method reverts this nicely.

LOSS OF ALL BODILY CONTROL

**Confirmed. Survivable.** Ditto with the above; bodily functions that happen unconsciously, such as breathing and your heartbeat, aren't affected.

REGAINING BODILY CONTROL

**Unconfirmed.**

BODILY CONTROL REMAINING THE SAME

**Unconfirmed.** This would be the same as nothing happening.

UNABLE TO SEE THE COLORS BLUE, ORANGE, ___ AND RED

**Confirmed. Safe.** In exchange for removing these colors, this one will give you the ability to see ultraviolet light. The implication is that the ___ in this entry is written using ultraviolet light, which normal computer monitors can't display, so it doesn't appear on your computer. It's supposed to remove vision, so it's unclear why it grants you this new visual ability. Possibly a bug.

NAUSEA

**Confirmed. Survivable.** The nausea doesn't come all at once; it will affect you at random times throughout the day, usually for around 15 minutes.

UNCONTROLLABLE BLEEDING FROM EVERY ORIFACE

**Confirmed. Survivable.** This one may be more likely than the others; alternatively, it may just be documented at a higher rate due to its severity. If you do the disagree/dance method quickly enough, you'll be fine, but if you wait, you may need medical attention and/or a blood transfusion. You _will_ eventually bleed to death if you don't use the disagree/dance method.

BREATHING HEAVILY

**Confirmed. Safe.**

BREATHING

**Unconfirmed.**

MAKING LOTS OF NOISE WITH YOUR BIG FAT MOUTH

**Unconfirmed.**

VOMITING

**Confirmed. Survivable.** You'll only vomit once.

EATING YOUR VOMIT

**Confirmed. Survivable.**

VOMITING YOUR VOMIT

**Unconfirmed.** Would be the same as vomiting.

STOP EATING YOUR VOMIT

**Confirmed. Survivable.** It's stated using incorrect grammar, but it makes you incapable of eating your own vomit. Yes, someone did test this and confirm it. Gross.

HEY WHY CANT YOU RESPECT MY DECISIONS IT'S MY LIFE IT'S MY LIFE IT'S MY LIFE

**Unconfirmed.** What would this even mean?

Information about side effects is hard to come by. Obviously, nobody's chomping at the bit to run actual experiments on these warnings. Most of the information we have on side effects comes from personal testimonies, as well as and a handful of foolhardy individuals that seem to have a death wish. Some of these individuals have replayed the side effect section of the Demo ending several times. How brave of them. The things people do for science, huh?

Let's run through some basics:

  1. Both you IRL and Stanley in-game are affected by side effects. The side effects that you and him receive are the same, and they are usually either instantaneous effects (e.g. 'not playing a video game') or permanent (e.g. 'uncontrollable bleeding').



  1. If you're fated to undergo multiple effects, you won't experience them all at once. In addition to this, effects that you experience do not synchronize with effects that Stanley does; this applies to the timing, as well as the order the effects are applied.



  1. The amount of time it takes for the effects to kick in is variable. The effects can happen during the demonstration, or they can happen on subsequent runs of The Stanley Parable, even after restarting the application. This includes the pause and menu screens, and it also includes the C++ demo proper, but Stanley isn't in the demo proper, so the character you play as in that game is unaffected. As a result, you can't use side effect exploits in that game (nor would you want to, since that version contains no ~ATH code and presumably no cognizant Narrator, either). If you aren't playing The Stanley Parable or the demo version, side effects won't start happening to you, although they also won't stop happening. This means that someone teleported to the sun will remain there even while the application is closed, while someone who bled uncontrollably will continue bleeding.



  1. Side effects will only begin transpiring after The Narrator records your safety dance. If you perform the safety dance correctly, The Narrator will quit the game, insulating you from additional side effects. If you also pressed the red disagree button, The Narrator _will save you, in real life, from whatever side effects you were undergoing,_ in addition to quitting the game _._ Using the examples above, someone teleported to the sun will be teleported back to the location they used to be in. They won't return to life. Someone who was bleeding uncontrollably will stop bleeding, but they may still require medical attention. The Narrator won't ever comment on what he did, since quitting the game appears to wipe The Narrator's memory; The Narrator intervening here is an assumption rather than a proven fact.



  1. Your safety dance is saved across subsequent playthroughs; it is one of the few instances of information persisting in the game after turning it off and on. Returning to the Demo ending, you can record a different dance, but if you complete the Demo ending this won't be possible, and you'll be stuck with what you have.



With all of this being said, how can we exploit side effects safely, with the least amount of risk to us personally? The first major piece of advice I can give is to make sure the disagree button is pressed during a Demo run, and (as I've mentioned before) that your safety dance is something simple to perform. Using one of the A, S, or D keys works well, since the only controls you really need to move is the W key and the mouse. The Narrator is intelligent enough to discern when a dance is 'close enough' to being correct, so performing your dance for him doesn't have to be exact, anyways. Just make sure you remember it.

The second thing you ought to do is keep a bystander nearby while you play. Preferably, they should have a defibrillator handy and be trained on how to use it. They should also be someone who doesn't play or watch The Stanley Parable recreationally. Teach the bystander your safety dance. If you suffer from a side effect and, for whatever reason, you can't perform the safety dance, the bystander can do it for you. Please note that this will put them at risk, too; anyone watching a version of the Demo ending will be at risk for the side effects, and even if the bystander doesn't watch you play, their performance of the safety dance will cause them to experience their own side effects. This is only the case if you're playing the Demo ending, from the safety dance portion onwards; if you're playing the rest of The Stanley Parable, you'll still be at risk, but your friend won't become fated to gain new side effects.

The third tip is to keep an eye out for side effects that Stanley will experience. Since the order of side effects isn't preserved between you and Stanley, he may experience a fatal side effect first, giving you a vital insight into your future. If you see him teleport to the sun, _quit the game immediately and never play or watch The Stanley Parable again._ This is very important: if you quit playing The Stanley Parable, the side effect can _never_ happen to you, so you'll be safe. This does mean that the warning I posted above is a little misleading, since it's possible to play through the Demo ending, quit the game, never play the game again, and be perfectly safe. I digress. If you see something like the spiders effect, the uncontrollable bleeding effect, or the one that causes cardiac arrest, this can also give you and your partner valuable information to prepare for the upcoming side effect, so Stanley's side effects are a valuable tool of foresight.

The fourth thing you should do when attempting any of this is make peace with the fact that, despite these safety precautions, you (and theoretically everyone and everything in a substantially large radius around you) have a non-zero chance of dying while undergoing these exploits. If you happen to get the 'being on the sun' effect, it's game over for you. There's no way for your partner to teleport you back in time to avoid thorough incineration, and even if they wanted to try, they would risk exposure to your charred, radiation soaked body, alongside pockets of low-density plasma that could cause their internal organs to shatter like peanut brittle. If the other sun-based effect teleports you into the sun's core or something, I don't even want to think about the consequences, and even amongst the most extreme of side effect exploiters there's an unspoken agreement to leave teleported players to die.

My safety preamble should have been long enough to accurately portray the dangers involved in this by now, so let's get to the actual exploits.

**9B - SIDE EFFECT EXPLOITS**

Stanley will be fated to receive the same side effects that you will, and this predestination will persist into future runs and even after quitting. However, once a side effect is applied, it only persists until the next restart. This is a problem for exploiters because of how Narrative Contradiction works. On the other hand, you don't need to play through the baby game to do side effect exploits, so it's almost worth the risk of being incinerated in a malicious crucible of thermonuclear fury. Which side effects are useful, though? Here's a list of some notable ones (remember, these are what happens when the effect happens to Stanley, not to you).

ROCK SOLID ABS

A valuable trait. This gives Stanley a melee weapon in the form of his fist, and works similarly to the crowbar modification. Having abs also allows Stanley to, oddly enough, survive from some heights he wouldn't normally be able to. It's odd because fall damage is already strange in this game, since long falls like the one into the metal crusher during the Museum ending don't kill you, but the fall from the lift room platform does. Speaking of which, the infamous fall from the lift room can be survived, as long as you fall from the lower platform. This would normally lead to a variant of the Leave ending, but Narrative Contradiction will get in your way. The Narrator will try and reach the Freedom ending instead, but will be prevented from doing so, yielding a variant of the Real Person ending. Interestingly, the abs are visible on Stanley's character model.

If you're combining this with 'not playing a demo' (see below) then the Leave ending can be directly accessed and Narrative Contradiction can be avoided.

NOT PLAYING A VIDEO GAME

This will crash any of the Games ending games, as well as the baby game. The Narrator panics when this happens, and he makes a lot of noise and drama about the crash. Oftentimes he will restart the game to fix this problem, and he'll avoid loading that game on subsequent playthroughs of the Games ending. Crashing has unpredictable effects on the game. Sometimes you'll be transported to other maps, or the game automatically restarts without a comment by The Narrator. If you're playing certain games (Portal, Please Don't Touch Anything) the 'game' section of the map will delete itself. It may be possible to exploit this to reach other sections of the map. Crashes haven't been known to cause Narrative Contradiction.

NOT PLAYING A DEMO

The #1 grand prize of this exploit type. You need Stanley to get the effect before entering the 'Demo Status' room (or 'Final Choice' room); if you do, the sign will be off when you enter. The point is to avoid the outcome where The Narrator realizes the entire facility is the demonstration. If you manage to do this, you'll be able to reach the 'Final Choice' room and interact with the button panel; this will cause Narrative Contradiction to occur, and The Narrator will lead you to the isolation chamber. At this point, a variation of the normal ending from The Stanley Parable Demonstration will play out, where you flash between areas of the demo, unexplored areas, and an escape elevator. There's an important caveat: _the game will not restart after you exit the elevator and enter the office_. The Narrator is still cognizant, so at this point he'll express confusion over the fact that you've reached the office again. He'll take a moment to collect himself, and then he'll start reading off his Freedom ending script again. Interestingly, there's a map transition right after The Narrator stops his monologue in the elevator and before the elevator opens, so this is very likely the standard Stanley Parable office map. This is essentially a completely new run, but you can carry over modifications from the rating system without needing to do the Art ending. This means you can use modifications anywhere you like in a first run. Additionally, any side effects Stanley has received will carry over to this run, which is important because you can circumvent the Narrative Contradiction problem I mentioned above. This only works if the side effect was applied during the demo; new side effects that you achieve while in a run will still cause Narrative Contradiction. As a final note, anecdotal evidence suggests that while the demo status button is off, and another player takes over playing The Stanley Parable, they won't become fated to receive side effects. 

LOCKED IN BITTER STRUGGLE WITH YOUR ALTER IDENTITY

Not a grand prize, but it definitely wins second place for how strange the outcome is. This will spawn a second instance of Stanley, who appears as his character model (the one you can see in the Real Person or Mariella endings). This character moves through corridors and persists through multiple restarts. It's generally unknown what his properties are; The Narrator won't comment on the new appearance, either, although this hasn't been rigorously tested, since the side effect has only been seen twice. He may be linked to the odd person who uses the same character model that you can sometimes see walking past a window.

BEING SPIDERS

Turning Stanley into spiders allows him to climb surfaces, and also allows him to squeeze through small gaps, including underneath doors; you may not be able to go _through_ walls, or fly, but this is pretty much as close as you can get to unblocked noclip. More on this will be covered in the backrooms chapter, alongside the 'open all doors' modification. While you are spiders, your eye level will drop to the floor, but no other aesthetic changes have been found thus far.

This is obviously most useful if you're using it in conjunction with the 'not playing a demo' side effect, since if you aren't, Narrative Contradiction will impede your progress. It may be possible to use this to follow where The Stanley Parable Adventure LineTM goes after the fourth restart of the Confusion ending, but nobody's been able to figure it out; the 'restarts' that happen during the Confusion ending also reset side effects, and if you try and trigger the side effect during that part of the run, you'll end up running into Narrative Contradiction.


	10. Narrative Contradiction, and the Apartment, Real Person, Void, and Cold Feet Endings

**10A - THE APARTMENT AND VOID ENDINGS**

The apartment ending is a pretty standard ending that most people are probably familiar with. Here's how it goes:

  1. Take the right door in the two doors room.
  2. Avoid the maintenance section and enter the lift room.
  3. Take the lift all the way up.
  4. Pick up the phone.



The Narrator will tell Stanley to pick up the phone and 'let her back into your life'; he's referring to Stanley's wife. After picking up the phone, The Narrator will transport Stanley to an apartment, and it sounds as though Stanley's wife is behind the door. The Narrator will then scare Stanley with a female mannequin, tells him to go inside, and then in almost all cases tells a story about how The Stanley Parable is the product of Stanley's imagination, that he's still in his office pushing buttons, and the longer he daydreams, the more time he's spent wasted behind a screen. Some concerning bits of dialogue are in here, but for the most part, this ending is inert.

If you try to leave via the hallway, The Narrator will block you with a brick wall. There are two other apartments, 426 and 425, that can be explored if you have the 'open all doors' modification. These apartments are inert and don't lead to anything new, although they are fully explorable. The more interesting thing to do here is to use crouching and the destruction + jump modifications to escape out of apartment 427's window. The Narrator will become annoyed and then leave you to restart the game yourself, since you're so vehemently against listening to him. Normally when you exit out of windows, you'll just get a variant of the Window ending, but this time The Narrator will forego this dialogue and leave you to wander about in a void. Unlike the Window ending, the white void here isn't bound by invisible walls, so you can walk as far as you want; the community has dubbed this the Void ending. Which ending you get is actually independent of where you are and has to do with something called Conditioning, but that's a topic for another time.

**10B - THE REAL PERSON ENDING**

If you're a Common Stanley, you've probably found the Real Person ending, watched the credits roll, and assumed that you'd found the 'true' ending of the game. Here's how to reach it:

  1. Take the right door in the two doors room.
  2. Avoid the maintenance section and enter the lift room.
  3. Take the lift all the way up.
  4. Unplug the phone.



After unplugging the phone, The Narrator states that unplugging the phone wasn't supposed to be a choice you could make; you made an incorrect choice and you are therefore a real person. He then plays a strange instructional video on the importance of decision-making skills, after which the telephone room will have succumbed to something called 'Narrative Contradiction'. This warps the environment and causes odd images and out-of-place objects to pop up. In addition, after this point The Narrator will turn some active modifications off; they seem to be whichever ones don't change the environment. This is temporary and modifications will turn to normal after you finish this ending, although The Narrator will express confusion when he realizes your modifications were turned off. In other words, he won't remember this run after it's finished. Anyways, The Narrator leads you back to the two doors room (the lift, incidentally, now has railings preventing you from falling off), where he tells you to take the left door.

If you take the door on the right, you'll be preventing from progressing due to Narrative Contradiction. You'll be forced to head back to the left door, where you'll find the meeting room is corrupted beyond repair. The Narrator then "shuts down the game" (does he? The game window doesn't close, to be clear. Is this cosmetic or is there something else going on behind the scenes?), after which you appear back in the two doors room. The Narrator returns to the game, complains about how his work is ruined, before the game 'restarts'.

If you take the door on the left, the story will progress as normal, until you reach the boss's office, which is now green and requires voice activation. Since Stanley (you in the game) can't speak, you can't progress, and The Narrator yells at you until the game 'restarts'.

After you make a choice and the game 'restarts', you'll be placed back in the two doors room, where you'll have to make the choice you didn't pick (if you don't, the game will just stop again shortly after going in the door). These false restarts don't result in side effects going away, and they don't count as a map change, either. After making both choices, you'll be teleported to a space directly above the two doors room, where you'll see Stanley's avatar standing in front of the two doors room. The credits will go by while The Narrator yells, pleads, and begs Stanley to make a choice, eventually giving up after deciding that Stanley needs time to make the right decision.

The 'doors' modifications are exempt from removal. As I've stated in a previous chapter, if you only have one door, the choice point will be the door leading to the maintenance section; the door leading to the lounge will be closed, as is the safety door on the maintenance elevator. If you have the three doors modification on, the new door will _usually_ be blocked with Narrative Contradiction like the door on the right, and you'll have to iterate through three 'restarts'. Narrative Contradiction is unpredictable, though, and on rare occasions you'll be able to reach door 4B4, which will be closed.

With the 'being spiders' side effect, it's possible to reach the maintenance lift by going over the railing; it's also possible to explore the Confusion ending office with three doors, and theoretically other areas. Narrative Contradiction will still impede your progress, but it's often possible to bypass this by going through the cracks. If you take the maintenance lift or go downstairs in the Confusion ending office, you'll reach the monitor room map, and The Narrator's response can vary. In one recorded case, he leads you outside via the Freedom ending door; in another, he leads you to the roof and tells you to get in the aircraft, where he'll pilot the vehicle. In more than one case, he will try and lead you back up the office via the path you didn't take (if you took the lift, the door on the right, and vice versa) similar to what happens if you reach here using attacking modifications.

**10C - NARRATIVE CONTRADICTION**

This is probably the first encounter you'll have with Narrative Contradiction. The effect is different on subsequent playthroughs, and it's believed to originate from ~ATH sections of code. The version from The Stanley Parable Demonstration, incidentally, is consistent every time, so it isn't applicable in this investigation.

The prevailing theory is that Narrative Contradiction is caused when there is a 'mismatch' between the number of 'meaningful' choices The Narrator perceives or presents you having, and the number of 'meaningful' choices you truly have. That is to say, if you _don't_ have a choice but The Narrator presents the circumstances as though you _do_ , or if you _do_ have a choice but The Narrator presents the circumstances as though you _don't_ , you can expect Narrative Contradiction to arise. 'Meaningful' means that these choices lead to discrete, separate endings, or alternate Narrator dialogue; we're disregarding the 'choice' of doing nothing/restarting here, since you can do that at pretty much any time. This is probably why Echelon 3 endings are the ones that cause The Narrator to react this way: The Narrator can correctly identify choices that lead to Echelon 2 endings, even if they aren't part of his script, but he has to improvise with choices that lead to Echelon 3 endings. Using the Echelon system to predict Narrative Contradiction isn't a fixed rule, obviously, since Echelon placement is ambiguous.

During the Real Person ending, this happens twice. First, you enter the room with the telephone, which The Narrator expects you to pick up. He doesn't expect you to unplug the phone, so this is a scenario where The Narrator didn't think you had a choice, but you did.

The next instance is when you reach the two doors room. The Narrator presents you with two doors, but regardless of which door you pick, the game will send you back to do the other option. As a result, your choice here is meaningless. The Narrator presents you with a choice, but it isn't a meaningful one, so this is a scenario where The Narrator thinks you had a choice, but you didn't (his dialogue in the left door 'ending' here states this explicitly).

Finally, you can find Narrative Contradiction during the Demo ending. This happens if the Demo Status button is off instead of on (if you have the 'not playing a demo' side effect active on Stanley). The effects are consistent with the demo proper, and it happens right after you reach the 'YES/NO' panel in the Final Choice room. The button you press doesn't matter, but The Narrator presents it as though it does; ergo, this is another scenario where The Narrator thinks you had a choice, but you didn't.

Now that we know what causes Narrative Contradiction, what does it do? Here are some known symptoms:

  1. Distortion of the environment



Objects can become twisted and corrupted in violent ways; this is the most evident effect of Narrative Contradiction.

  1. Misplaced objects and textures



Objects and textures can appear in places they aren't supposed to, such as railings, forklifts, filing cabinets, doors, posters, and even entirely separate sections of the map.

  1. Distortion of information



This one is more difficult to spot, but you can catch it during the Real Person ending. The numbering of doors can become twisted and corrupted, reading textures incorrectly and even compressing textures so that more than three numbers appear on a door. These numbers are important in determining where a door leads, so a corrupted number leads to very strange behavior that I'll elaborate on in the backrooms chapter. You can notice this in room 445 during the Real Person ending; note that even though the window seems to lead to room 445 (you can see the desk with the number), this door is corrupted, so going underneath it using 'being spiders' leads somewhere else.

It's _possible_ that Narrative Contradiction can cause more subtle changes, e.g. the change to the boss's office during the Real Person ending. Considering The Narrator doesn't comment on this change, as well as the fact that he made another change (the new railing on the lift) a short while ago, this is likely untrue, but is still being debated. The alternative would be that The Narrator/another entity made the change, but it's unclear why they would want to.

There are three more notes about Narrative Contradiction. Firstly, if you're using modifications, The Narrator will expect you to be able to find different paths using it, since he's the one who applied the modification in the first place, so you can't use it to cause an 'unexpected' choice. Secondly, you'll never see the effects of Narrative Contradiction change anything firsthand; you must have a physical barrier obscuring your view before it can be applied. Thirdly, the effect is constrained to the map that the offending choice was made in, and persists if you leave and re-enter a map.

The Narrative Contradiction problem I mentioned in the previous chapter under the 'side effect exploits' section is because side effects can allow you to make new choices. The Narrator seems to base possible choices off of your state at the start of the run, and side effects can be applied in the middle of a run. This is why the 'not being in a demo' circumvents this problem; you can be in a 'new' run while retaining past side effects, and the game even enters into a new map to reach the office so the Narrative Contradiction from the demo construction facility doesn't carry over.

The cause of Narrative Contraction may seem like it happens in other endings, but weirdly enough, if you examine them closely, the guideline holds up. The Freedom/Countdown, Zending/Games, Confusion, Mariella, Museum… all of the junctions that lead to these endings are presented as real choices by The Narrator, and they lead to real changes in the ending you achieve. Others, like the Window ending, are clearly ones he expected to happen. The Confusion ending does raise some questions, since there are a lot of choices in that ending that don't matter at all; I'll explain the consensus about that ending in its own chapter. It seems that The (or at least, a) Narrator is a key ingredient of Narrative Contradiction, though, since it doesn't appear during the Escape ending.

**10D - FINDING NARRATIVE CONTRADICTION, AND THE COLD FEET ENDING**

To put the hypothesis to the test, let's take a look at two conventional endings that can lead to Narrative Contradiction. The first is the 128 ending. If you get a run with the competitive leaderboard in it, The Narrator will allow you to rate it like the first modification. His dialogue following the rating can vary, but most of the time (and _always_ during a first run) it won't be dependent on your rating; additionally, last time we rated something, it _did_ give different dialogue, which means this is being presented as though it were a meaningful choice. Unfortunately, we're taken to the baby game map directly after, so if this was a typical Games run, you wouldn't be able to exploit it to find Narrative Contradiction. Instead, we'll rate the leaderboard and _then_ jump off the modification rating platform. The choice that incited the Narrative Contradiction (rating the leaderboard) is independent from your jump, and your view of the bottom is obstructed by a physical barrier (the rating platform). Darkness may also be enough to cause Narrative Contradiction, but it's unclear. Anyways, when he lights up the ground and notices the Narrative Contradiction, he WILL comment on it, but instead he suspects that it was due to his tampering with the code, so he'll restart the game fresh. Notably, he'll remove all active modifications, so you'll be forced to burn 4 hours on the Art ending before wasting the jump modification. If it were possible for the jump modification to start you in the two doors room, this could be circumvented by just getting the jump mod and _then_ the leaderboard, but this isn't the case.

Incidentally, going back through the doors using the 'open all doors' modification after rating the leaderboard yields similar results. Like the 'jump' modification, the 'open all doors' modification starts you in Stanley's office, but it comes at a 12% rate instead of a <1% rate, so it's easier to pull off.

The second ending, the Cold Feet ending, is one we haven't covered yet. It goes as follows:

  1. Take the right door in the two doors room.
  2. Avoid the maintenance section and enter the lift room.
  3. Take the lift and immediately back out so it leaves you behind.
  4. Jump off the platform.



Normally, after stepping backwards off the lift, The Narrator will tell you the lift isn't coming back, and then he will goad you to jump to the bottom of the platform. If you jump, you'll die, achieving the Cold Feet ending, and restarting the game. There's nothing else to interact with on the platform, and leaving the room using the 'open all doors' modification will just cause The Narrator to route you back to the Freedom ending. We can find Narrative Contradiction by reaching the bottom of the lift room from this platform. How? Well, by crouching. Crouching doesn't negate fall damage, but it does cause your height to decrease. We believe that the hitbox that triggers Stanley's death only triggers it if you _fall_ through it, not if you crouch through it, which means if you crouch at just the right moment, you can skip across the hitbox while you're falling and end up at the bottom of the lift room. Incidentally, the death hitbox in the .bsp file of the office map is a larger rectangular prism, and yet the bottom of the lift room is explorable anyways, even if you don't do this crouch trick. This is more evidence that the .bsp files are false versions of the actual map, or at the very least they aren't the full picture. This crouching exploit is a very new discovery, so applications are still being discussed. It's unclear if this is a bug or an intentional game mechanic.

In any case, The Narrator didn't expect you to survive the fall, so this is a situation where you can make a meaningful choice that The Narrator didn't expect or present. He'll realize that you must be a real person, play the instructional video (this counts as a physical obstruction for the purposes of Narrative Contradiction) and then the bottom of the lift room will be corrupted. Trying to leave via the open door 'B' can be done before the video plays, and it leads to Narrative Contradiction sooner. The Narrator will get you to leave via a door (not the one that leads to the bottom of the monitor room), which leads to a backroom area of the map. You'll find a few entirely original areas: a bathroom, a few offices, a cafeteria, and stairs leading upwards. From here, The Narrator will attempt to lead you through the office back to the two doors room, where a variant of the Real Person ending can occur.

As a general rule of thumb, if you do something that The Narrator doesn't expect to be possible, he'll accuse you of being a real person, and he'll try and reach a variant of the Real Person ending. If you do something that isn't a true choice instead, he'll continue to think of you as Stanley and your options are less limited; he will instead express shock or confusion, or alternatively blame the issue on a bug in the code or modifications.


	11. The Confusion and Disoriented Endings, and the Adventure Line^TM

**11A - THE CONFUSION ENDING**

Surprisingly, this ending is quite firmly on rails. Here's the list of choices:

  1. Take the right door in the two doors room.
  2. Go into the maintenance section.
  3. Take the lift down.



After taking the lift down, The Narrator will always open the metal shutters, causing you to see the monitor room before you were supposed to. This is a 'spoiler', so The Narrator will restart the game because he believes his story is ruined. This ending has a recurring theme of restarts, so let's go through them one by one:

After Restart 1: When you reach the two doors room, there will be more than two doors here. The Narrator will open all of them and tell us to find the story, but after walking for a while, you and he will realize that this is boring and that there's nothing here except a non-Euclidean version of the office that loops through generic variants. He'll restart the game again.

After Restart 2: This time, the two doors room has no doors. The Narrator will tell you to backtrack; the first part of the office is replaced by a blue carpeted corridor that loops around itself. After reaching the end of the corridor, The Narrator will tell you to head backwards, where the door you walked through is replaced with a brown warehouse area. The Narrator restarts again.

After Restart 3: The Narrator invokes the aid of The Stanley Parable Adventure LineTM. This will lead you though another section of the office, and The Narrator will talk about the philosophical ramifications of a journey/destination, before playing some adventuring music. Eventually, The Adventure LineTM leads you back to the office, and into the monitor room. The Narrator restarts again.

After Restart 4: The Narrator still has The Adventure LineTM in the game, but instead of progressing that way, he'll open door #437 and lead you through a non-Euclidian hallway of varying length. You'll find the LineTM again during part of this. Then, you'll find the Confusion ending schedule, which details every part of this ending. I will use 'The Schedule' to refer to both the physical schedule beyond room #437, as well as whatever entity guides/uses this object. Here's what The Schedule says:

Deviate from maintenance room

End up in monitor room

Narrator restarts the game

**First Restart**

Discover the 2-doors room now has many additional doors

Aimless wandering

Narrator restarts the game

**Second Restart**

The office is now a dead end

Turn around, find another dead end

End up in another building

Narrator restarts the game

**Third Restart**

Adventure Line

Nonsense philosophy and music

Return to the office

Return to the monitor room

**Fourth Restart**

Adventure into unexplored territory

Find the line again

Find the Confusion Ending Schedule

Narrator restarts the game

**Fifth Restart**

Narrator forgets about previous restarts

Stanley attempts to play the story but is prevented

Unable to go anywhere or do anything

The game restarts on its own

**Sixth Restart**

Find the line again

Begin following the line

Find an identical replica of the office that has begun to deteriorate

Attempt to make up a story here

Narrator restarts the game

**Seventh Restart**

There is no longer an office, simply black space

Wander in the blackness

Find a book store

Get bored and leave

Narrator restarts the game

**Eighth Restart**

The Narrator is gone

After a long time, Stanley dies

From this point on, The Schedule says that The Narrator is supposed to restart the game again, but after seeing The Schedule, The Narrator decides not to. The Schedule then stops its timer, before restarting the game with a harsh sounding alarm. The Narrator doesn't remember anything from the previous restarts. Contrary to The Schedule, you aren't prevented from progressing, so the fifth restart is really where the Confusion ending ends.

Unlike other endings, the Confusion ending is very self-contained. The 'three/one doors' modifications don't cause the new two doors room variants to be different. Windows are now covered with an unbreakable type of glass, preventing you from escaping using destructive modifications. This includes windows that normally didn't have glass, such as the ones leading outside. You can't even interact with the door in room #427, which prevents you from getting the Coward ending and prematurely interrupting the Confusion ending. Additionally, using the 'open all doors' modification to explore other places will typically lead you back to the normal restart or a variant of it in one way or another. For example, if you use it to follow the line after Restart 4, it'll duck into a crevasse of one sort or another where you can't follow it, and then it'll reappear at some point during your exploration, before you find the circular two doors room.

One way to derail the Confusion ending is to open door #437 prematurely. When you reach The Schedule, the following happens:

Before the maintenance lift: the timer will be there, but the rest of The Schedule will be blank. The Narrator will express confusion; he's allegedly never seen this room before. He'll tell you to turn back.

After Restart 1: The Schedule will have its normal contents from this point on. If this is your first time there, The Narrator will tell you to turn back and check on the two doors room to see if it really has 'many additional doors'. If you went to The Schedule before the maintenance lift, The Narrator will be surprised something changed, and then he'll ponder if other endings have their own Schedule. He'll either tell you not to check on the two doors room, or he'll simply state that he's not going to restart the game, like what happens in the actual ending. At this point, The Schedule stops timing and restarts the game.

After Restart 2: If this is your first time here, The Narrator will tell you to turn back and check on the two doors room to see if it's really a dead end. Otherwise, you'll get the same result where The Narrator doesn't (or doesn't want you to) cooperate with The Schedule.

After Restart 3: The Narrator will be shocked that The Adventure LineTM was something The Schedule predicted, and he'll instead implore you not to follow the LineTM. From here, you have a choice; if you continue to follow the LineTM, The Narrator doesn't stop you, but he is curious about if The Schedule will continue to predict the future. If you don't follow the LineTM, The Narrator will open the door to the monitor room prematurely, and accidentally lead you there himself. Despite this, The Schedule will restart the game with the same 'powering off' noises and harsh alarm, implying that this isn't how the Confusion ending is supposed to go. If you visit The Schedule after the LineTM has already led you astray, The Narrator will instead lead you somewhere else, or he'll/you'll reach the monitor room and he will disobey The Schedule and decide not to restart, before The Schedule, again, restarts the game.

We're fairly sure that if you deviate from The Schedule in any way, you'll cause it to restart the game; it always does this by stopping the timer and then restarting with a harsh grating alarm, although the time between these two events varies. As it turns out, there may be a way to, in theory, follow the Confusion ending to its scheduled conclusion. If you use the 'being spiders' side effect to, after Restart 3, stay within the LineTM by following it up walls and ceilings, then The Narrator's response will change when you reach The Schedule. This has only been tested once, but when you reach The Schedule, he'll realize that you and him have, quite literally, 'found the story', and that it's actually a part of his duty to restart the game. After doing this, the following happens:

After Restart 5: Sure enough, The Narrator forgets about previous restarts. You'll be in the office, but with the two doors gone, and no other means of escape. Side effects don't carry to the next restart, so you won't be able to crawl underneath doors; additionally, The Narrator tries opening some doors, only to reveal walls behind them. These walls are the same sort that you'll find behind doors if you try opening them using cheats. The game will automatically restart.

After Restart 6: The Narrator will notice The Adventure LineTM through a window and lead you to follow it. The Narrator will express confusion, since according to his memories, he's never invoked the LineTM. It will eventually start crawling across walls, at which point you can no longer follow it. Eventually, you'll reach a dilapidated version of the office; this version is covered in dust, has cloudy windows, and is dark. Rather than 'trying to make up a story here', The Narrator will express disbelief and try and explore the area further, before The Schedule restarts the game.

There are many unanswered questions to this variant of the Confusion ending. Is the dilapidated version of the office consistent across multiple playthroughs? Is there a way to achieve this without using side effects, and is it possible to see the rest of The Schedule's scheduled events and reach a 'true' Confusion ending? What happens if you use the 'open doors' modification to find The Schedule after The Narrator forgets about the past restarts? Can you use the 'being spiders' side effect to reach anywhere else, like following the LineTM after restart 4? The side effect exploiter community has expressed more interest in using side effects to get past Narrative Contradiction than exploring this variant of the Confusion ending, which is a real shame. It's also especially frustrating since this ending has some major deviations from our current theories of how Narrative Contradiction works. In particular, after restarts 1 and 4 there are choices that The Narrator presents as meaningful, but clearly don't lead anywhere new. The Narrator even explicitly states this in the latter case (in the circular two doors room):

"Ah, a choice! We get to make a decision; from here, the story is in our control! How important we mustn't squander the opportunity."

On the other hand, it seems that when you or The Narrator does something that _The Schedule_ doesn't present as a meaningful choice, he'll restart the game.

The third piece of this puzzle requires us to revisit the Museum ending. I've mentioned previously that you can't invoke Narrative Contradiction by using modifications during the inciting choice, but this isn't entirely accurate. You can destroy the windows in the museum to reach a variant of the Void ending, or a variant of the Leave ending if you have the realistic environment modification on. The key difference is that Narrative Contradiction will pop up everywhere in areas out of view, which you can then find if you explore. The Curator doesn't comment on this whatsoever, and The Narrator is gone, too, so the prevailing theory is that Narrative Contradiction depends on whichever entity has control over the story. The Narrator is Cognizant, so he can recognize when Stanley has a modification and would have expected the possibility of leaving the museum in this way. The Curator doesn't seem to be Cognizant, so the possibilities she can account for are limited.

In the same vein, there's this third entity, The Schedule, that expresses control during the Confusion ending, instead of The Narrator. The Narrator's powers clearly still _exist_ ; he can restart the game, he opens doors, and he summons the Adventure LineTM. Despite this, there's evidently a higher force at work here controlling (or at least, predicting using the physical version of The Schedule) the narrative. Does the sequence of events where The Schedule's timer stops followed by the restart override Narrative Contradiction for The Schedule, or does it exist alongside it? Does The Schedule restarting mean you've done something it didn't _expect_ , or is it just something it does if you deviate from its plans? One thing that there is consensus on is that The Schedule is very likely present throughout all runs. Firstly, the physical manifestation of The Schedule exists in every run; you can open door #437 to see the timer-only version, and then turn back and proceed with any other run normally. Secondly, The Schedule takes on different forms in other endings, such as the Escape ending. Whether or not The Schedule has variants for every ending remains to be seen.

**11B - THE ADVENTURE LINE AND THE DISORIENTED ENDING**

The circumstances that cause The Narrator to invoke The Adventure LineTM aren't fully understood, but we're pretty sure that one part of the equation is if you reach a situation where the Freedom ending path is 'spoiled'. In these circumstances, The Narrator will stop trying to salvage the story and instead restart the game. There are many endings where The Narrator restarts the game, but in those cases (Games, Freedom, Coward, Leave) he always has something to show Stanley, some deeper narrative to end. In other cases, Stanley dies, and in cases where The Narrator can't really find a good story (Window, Void, 128, some variants of the Games ending), he'll leave you to restart the game yourself. The Narrator usually never restarts _as a mechanism to_ find a meaningful story for Stanley unless you spoil the Freedom ending.

The only way we know of to 'spoil' the game other than via the monitor room is by reaching the countdown room by going through the door on the left instead of the metal shutters. In this event, you'll deviate from the Confusion ending's scheduled path, but since this is before restart 1 of the Confusion ending, The Schedule is in its blank, timer-only state. Because The Schedule doesn't have an ending loaded onto it, it won't restart the game when you deviate from the Confusion ending path. Here's what happens this time:

After Restart 1: You'll restart with the 'extremely short start' variant of the office, and no doors will be in the two doors room. The Narrator will state similar dialogue to the Confusion ending, where he's 'lost the story' and asks if you changed anything in the countdown room. He reopens the door behind you and gets you to turn back, and the office now has a turn (or turns) in it instead of being straight. Door #425 will be at the end of the hall, instead of being off to the side. This door leads to office #425 and the Confusion ending office (just like in other runs); there's also the dissociative sensation of seeing the 'standard' office through the window of office #425. If you stand near the window, The Narrator will comment on it, although the glass is unbreakable so this can't be exploited in any way. Anyways, The Narrator will lead you through the Confusion ending office, but the LineTM isn't here. The Narrator leads you in different directions. Eventually, he'll lead you to the lift room (the metal shutter door that leads outside is closed) and then to the bottom of the monitor room, where he'll realize the story is spoiled and restart the game again. If you deviate from the path at all, The Schedule will restart the game, just like before. You can trace the path of the typical Confusion ending, and you'll exit via door #426 back into the short variant of the office. For context, in the standard Confusion ending, door #426 is where you come out of when you pass by the fern and reach the office again.

After Restart 2: It starts similar to restart 1, but the turn(s) in the office that occurs after you turn back has metamorphosed into a larger series of rooms and hallways. You'll come across a orange-carpeted room that's larger than normal rooms in the office, with desks arranged in a maze-like formation. The Narrator will become disoriented at this mess, which means you'll need to stumble around to solve the maze for a while. Sometimes, you'll be able to find a chair that can be used to climb on top of the desks, which will allow you to skip the puzzle; jumping accomplishes the same purpose. This is something The Narrator comments on and reprimands you for, stating that you're cheating at the game. In fact, depending on The Narrator's mood, he can send you to the Serious Room for doing this; more details on this will come in a future chapter. At the end of this area, you'll find the boss's office. The Narrator is missing his script, and as a result, he doesn't know what the password is. You can enter the password in, but this will lead to The Schedule restarting the game; instead, you'll have to stop here and let The Narrator restart the game.

After Restart 3: The Narrator invokes The Adventure LineTM, which traces a path similar to the one in the typical Confusion ending, but it goes up an additional flight of stairs. Eventually, it leads you out of the right door in the circular two doors room. The LineTM leads you back into the 'standard' office layout by exiting door #437 from the other side, which thoroughly disorients The Narrator. The LineTM leads to the monitor room at this point, but The Narrator asks you to enter door #425. You'll eventually reach the other side of door #426, which leads back to the original 'very short' variant of the office. After this, The Narrator senses something is 'very wrong with the map', and restarts the game.

After Restart 4: This time, the LineTM leads to the two doors room, but part of the LineTM from somewhere else leads back out of the two doors room and into door #425. The Narrator is intrigued and curious, and he asks that you follow the LineTM again. The two doors room has both doors; the LineTM leads you through the door on the right, where you'll reach the lounge. The floor of the lounge has been thoroughly vandalized by the LineTM, which has covered it in circular yellow paths before exiting. The LineTM detours through the maintenance section, and then heads back to room #425; incidentally, at this point, there's another path leading from room #425 to room #427. Following the LineTM, the two versions interweave with each other, and The Narrator comments on how it's difficult to keep track of which part of the LineTM is going in which direction. After making a few loops around the office, with an increasingly disoriented Narrator and a room #427 that is increasingly painted with yellow, the LineTM leads Stanley through the left door in the two doors room, where you'll go past the meeting room and downstairs. Instead of the Mariella ending area, this door leads into a white void. In the distance, you'll eventually see an apartment building; this is actually Stanley's apartment from the Apartment ending, which the LineTM heads into via a window. The Narrator leads you into an elevator; when you get out, you'll see that the LineTM has left apartment #427 and headed down some stairs. Following it will lead you all the way back to the office and room #427, where The Narrator will notice that the LineTM ends by merging with the start, where the 'The Stanley Parable Adventure Line' text is. This thoroughly upsets The Narrator, who resents the idea that this 'adventure' will repeat over and over and over. He leads Stanley into another room and closes a door, in an effort to break the cycle by avoiding the LineTM altogether; The Schedule then restarts the game.

After Restart 5: The ending is finished, and The Narrator doesn't remember anything.

If you deviate from the path any time after Restart 1, The Schedule will restart the game. This is an ending where you can see The Schedule after restart 3 if you open the left door in the circular two doors room. It confirms that The Schedule does have other variants depending on the ending you're in; in this case, the ending is listed as the Disoriented ending, and has the following path:

Deviate from maintenance room

End up in countdown timer room

Narrator restarts the game

**First Restart**

Office is a shorter variant

The 2-doors room is a dead end

Turn around and reach the room with the yellow lift

End up at the bottom of the monitor room

Narrator restarts the game

**Second Restart**

Office has turned into a maze

Find the boss's office

Narrator doesn't know the code

**Third Restart**

Adventure Line

Emerge into the standard office

Wander back to the shorter version of the office

Narrator restarts the game

**Fourth Restart**

Follow the Line through the lounge, maintenance room, and back

The Line overlaps with itself many times

Find Stanley's apartment

Go back to room #427 where the Line loops

Follow the Line over and over for a long time

Eventually, Stanley dies

There was a myth that, after the Confusion ending, The Narrator forgot about everything because that was the next step in The Schedule. If you deviate from The Schedule in any way, it restarts the game and The Narrator forgets everything, so this is a false assumption. The Disorientation ending version of The Schedule provides additional evidence for this, since there's nothing in it that says The Narrator forgets about previous endings, and yet he does after the The Schedule restarts the game. This implies that The Narrator's state of being is stored by The Schedule in some way before its timer begins - that is to say, after a run ends but before a new run begins.

It seems that The Adventure LineTM is either 1. associated with The Schedule in some way or 2. only invoked by The Narrator if he loses track of the story in some way. The latter may be slightly more likely, since you can see The Schedule without the LineTM being present. To end off this section, I've placed a list of things we know about the LineTM below in the same format as in section 5C:

\- Can the Adventure LineTM affect the environment?

Almost certainly **Yes.** We see this happen after restart 4 of the Confusion ending, when it has pushed aside ceiling tiles forcefully. Evidence of this occurs during restart 3 of the ending, as well, as it seems to be able to knock over chairs and move other objects. The same things are observed during the Disoriented ending, but there's more direct evidence: during the second time you pass through the hallway after the door on the left, the LineTM will sometimes have knocked down paintings off the wall that weren't knocked down during the first time you passed the area. You'll also see room #427 in an increasingly damaged state every time you revisit it, since the LineTM circles around it over and over before exiting it again. Incidentally, the LineTM never seems to touch Stanley's computer when it enters room #427.

\- Is the Adventure LineTM Sentient or Cognizant?

**Inconclusive**. It exhibits different behavior depending on the ending, and it take superficially different paths in the same ending (for example, climbing up walls in a different way). This could just be due to a random algorithm, though. There's no real way to test for Cognizance right now, and there's definitely no way to test for Sentience. The LineTM _does seem to be_ aware that destroying Stanley's computer will destroy your computer in real life, since it avoids it strictly during the Disoriented ending. This could just be due to programming rather than any sort of true awareness, though.

\- Is the Adventure LineTM active during play (not pre-rendered before the run/restart begins)?

Almost certainly **Yes.** This is clear if you look at the evidence critically; in the Confusion ending, after restart 3, the LineTM doesn’t exit door #426 on the first time you're in the office, but it does on the second time after you exit door #426. You'll also see more obvious changes in the environment after the 4th restart of the Disoriented ending. The two possibilities are that the LineTM changes the environment and moves while you're out of sight (therefore it's active during play), or that all of these changes to the map are pre-rendered as separate copies of the map. Since the LineTM exhibits superficial changes between playthroughs, and since these changes can impact the environment in different ways, I would argue the second possibility is very unlikely.

\- Does the Adventure LineTM actually serve the purpose of 'finding a story' for The Narrator?

**Inconclusive.** The LineTM clearly plays a role in The Schedule's plans, and those plans are part of _a_ story. If you follow the LineTM perfectly during the Confusion ending, The Narrator will claim that The Schedule's story is correct at the end, but on the other hand, he only says this after you _disobey_ the LineTM after restart 4. Additionally, this instance was only ever observed by the community once, so it's hardly reliable.

\- Is the Adventure LineTM guided or employed by The Schedule?

**Inconclusive, possibly No**. The LineTM has only been shown to appear in endings where The Schedule is directly or indirectly involved. In the Confusion ending, The Schedule is directly visited, and in the Confusion and Disoriented endings, The Schedule prevents Stanley/The Narrator from deviating too far. If the goal of The Schedule is to get Stanley and The Narrator to accomplish the goals that are listed, then the answer to this question is no, because Stanley needs to follow the LineTM perfectly in order to continue with the Confusion ending, and this can't be done without the 'being spiders' side effect. The alternative is that The Schedule does employ the LineTM, but the LineTM is just really bad at its job.

\- DID U GET THE BROOM CLOSET ENDING? THEB ROOM CLOSET ENDING WAS MY FAVRITE!1 XD

The Broom Closet ending isn't a real ending, but there's actually a small deviation of the Disoriented ending in which The Adventure LineTM utterly destroys the broom closet. This will happen if you've previously entered the Broom Closet twice, so that there's a board nailed to the door. The board will be ripped from the wall, the door will be open, the shelf is toppled over, and there's janitorial equipment littered everywhere. The LineTM will have painted the closet almost entirely with yellow before moving on.


	12. Conditioning, Crouching Exploits, and the Annoyed, Survive, Alone, Hostile, and Repetition endings

**12A - CONDITIONING**

Examine the following text:

0

This is a simple number, but it's also the entirety of what's stored in the axis_value_onstart.txt file within The Stanley Parable's file directory. Due to how easily it can be manipulated, the community was quickly able to experiment and determine what this file does; it is an indicator of The Narrator's 'mood' on a first run.

What's a 'mood'? It's an aspect of The Narrator's general disposition during gameplay. You can manipulate The Narrator's mood, also known as 'conditioning' him, by doing various things in the game. There are four types of moods in total, but let's start with the main two: Satisfaction and Dissatisfaction. If you've ever stood around without doing anything and heard The Narrator give an annoyed comment, that's a result of his Dissatisfaction value rising. His dramatic narration during the Freedom ending, on the other hand, is due to Satisfaction. The two are mutually exclusive; if you raise Satisfaction, it's the same as lowering Dissatisfaction.

Mood carries over between endings. Mood can change by taking a different path through the game, or by doing mundane actions, like standing around. Mood changes more dramatically after achieving an ending; each ending has its own mood value. For instance, the Freedom ending boosts Satisfaction noticeably, and the Games (the Portal version) ending boosts Dissatisfaction noticeably.

The relationship between these two moods can be more clearly observed in the axis_value_onstart.txt file I mentioned earlier. The value you write into the file is The Narrator's 'neutral' mood, which is the mood he'll be set to at the start of a first run. If you set the number within it to a positive value, The Narrator will exhibit Satisfaction, while if you set it to a negative value, he'll exhibit Dissatisfaction. With regards to the game, mood is added/subtracted to the current mood value if you do things within a run, while endings cause your current mood value to be averaged with an 'ending' specific value.

What can we achieve using moods? A value close to 0 won't cause notable deviations, so you have to modify the axis_value_onstart.txt file or explicitly go after a mood within the game for any real effects to occur. If you have a high level of Dissatisfaction, The Narrator will become bored, and sometimes yield different dialogue or dialogue variants. The dialogue variants at the start of the game are caused by this, since the Dissatisfaction threshold for them is very low. If you exit a window with a high enough Dissatisfaction, it'll result in a Void ending rather than a Window ending, although your location on the map is also relevant. Deviations are more difficult to get using Dissatisfaction once you start following the Freedom ending and reach the monitor room map, because The Narrator knows you're following his directions by that point and will be more invested in what happens. The Stanley Parable Demonstration will pop up more often within the Games ending with a higher Dissatisfaction, so it's useful if you're trying to do Demo exploits. Satisfaction will cause The Narrator to be more enthusiastic when progressing through the Freedom ending; his dialogue will become more consistent, although he'll articulate it with greater emphasis, expression, and attention. If you head into Echelon 3 zones where The Narrator is forced to improvise, he'll put more effort into making up something plausible, and he'll be less prone to sarcasm.

Interestingly, there's no limit to how large you can make the number inside the axis_value_onstart.txt file; the application will never over/underflow. It's unclear what actual format these numbers are stored (floating point, integer, etc), because there are plenty of strange values you can put into axis_value_onstart.txt. For instance, operations such as log(2) and sin(3) work, as do values such as pi. Whatever underlying code reads the mood values must be ~ATH based, since a wide variety of inputs can be selected. Pi, pie, the_ratio_of_a_circle's_circumference_to_its_diameter, 3.14…, and π all yield the same result.

All of these are standard real numbers, so they don't cause any strange mood behaviors that you couldn't already get to by inputting integers or fractions, or by going through endings. What happens if we input something stranger, like a square root? Square roots have two solutions, a positive and a negative one. Let's say we input sqrt(4) into the file. The mathematical solutions to sqrt(4) are 2 and -2. You would think that the game would just use the positive version, but it instead causes The Narrator's mood value at the first run to be 0. The community initially figured that it was some sort of error or glitch, until someone tried doing 1 + sqrt(4), which caused The Narrator to exhibit Satisfaction. It turns out that inputting anything with multiple solutions will average all of the solutions to find the correct value. In this case, ((1 + 2) + (1 - 2)) / 2 is equal to 2/2, or 1, which is a positive number, so The Narrator's mood is Satisfied.

What about imaginary numbers? It turns out, this reveals the other two mood types, Benevolence and Malevolence. Benevolence is represented with multiples of +sqrt(-1), or i, the imaginary unit. Malevolence is represented with -i, the negative version. Since they're the negative versions of each other, they have the same mutual exclusivity as Satisfaction and Dissatisfaction. You can input something like 1 + i to create a complex number, causing The Narrator to exhibit a combination of Satisfaction/Dissatisfaction and Benevolence/Malevolence (in this case, Benevolence and Malevolence). These two moods are a standard part of the game just like Satisfaction and Dissatisfaction, since they can be raised without modifying the axis_values_onstart.txt file. In fact, all endings cause a combination of impacts on the two mood dichotomies. There is currently no way to 'read' moods while inside the game as a numerical value, but it's possible to deduce estimates for The Narrator's mood after an ending by doing the same thing over and over and making a note of when his behavior changes. You can compare these changes in behavior to mood values tested via manipulating the axis_value_onstart.txt file. Since information on the topic has been out for a while, #TeamStats did some testing and charted their estimates in the following graph:

Several interesting observations can be seen by looking at the graph. Firstly, it appears that endings are sorted into three hierarchies, depending on how long they take to reach. Every entry in a hierarchy is situated at the same distance from the origin, so they create circular rings. These rings are separated by a factor of five each. The first hierarchy consists of 'short' endings; these are all the endings that don't require a map change. They have a distance of 0.2 from the origin. Some of these would be classically considered 'short' by any casual observer, such as the Coward or Window endings, but others are atypical, such as the Apartment and Mariella endings, which are fairly time intensive. The second hierarchy consists of 'normal' endings, which do require a map change. They have a distance of 1. The third hierarchy has a distance of 5 from the origin, and seems to be specific to endings that take a long time or have long periods of waiting. (The coordinates of these endings are marked with brackets on the graph since the graph is too small to portray all three hierarchies).

The second observation to make is that moods are distributed heavily towards Dissatisfaction, and slightly towards Malevolence. The Dissatisfaction-Malevolence quadrant is populated with almost all of the endings in the game. Out of the other endings, there's the following:

Freedom, which is The Narrator's preferred ending

Genocide and Hoarder, variants of the Freedom ending

Hostile, which follows different rules

Art and Victory, which take hours to complete

Critic and Serious, which can only be done once

Zending, Real Person, Escape, Confusion, Disoriented, and Heaven. These endings don't have an impact on The Narrator's mood; he doesn't remember these endings after they happen.

The Demo ending has not been tested, for obvious reasons.

Satisfaction is really rare in the ending distribution, and Benevolence is almost unachievable. It's interesting that the Zending, Confusion, and Disoriented endings are ones in which The Narrator forgets, since these seem to be ones in which Satisfaction or Benevolence would be the natural way for The Narrator's mood to change; within the Confusion and Disoriented endings, The Narrator functions as our ally and is just as confused as we are, and in the Zending, he's trying to 'show us something beautiful'. Even if we antagonize The Narrator in the end, his demeanor certainly never turns hostile or bored during the ending. It's possible that an unknown entity(ies) is keeping The Narrator from experiencing Satisfaction or Benevolence aside from select cases, although we're now skirting into the territory of 'baseless conjecture', so I digress.

**12B - BENEVOLENCE, MALEVOLENCE, THE NARRATOR'S HOSTILE AND GENEROUS STATES, AND THE HOSTILE AND ALONE ENDINGS**

Conditioning The Narrator's Benevolence and Malevolence lead to the more interesting outcomes. If these values are low, some predictable things happen, like changes in The Narrator's dialogue (he may insult or compliment you depending on your progress in the game). Out of the more severe possibilities, the most common one and the one I mentioned in the 'Summary' section of this document is when The Narrator's Malevolence reaches a critical threshold (-0.95i). If you're a Common Stanley you've probably encountered it if you've replayed the Countdown ending five or more times in a row, trying to find a way to solve the 'puzzle' inside the countdown room. If you've done this, you've accidentally conditioned The Narrator to be hostile towards you; in this hostile state, he will directly impede your progress, lead you through pointless areas of the office in a loop just to waste your time, or invoke some kind of plot device to kill or harm you. This typically includes something in the office collapsing, such as the ceiling (he'll often say something along the lines of 'Ceiling panels fall; Stanley dies', a reference to the 'Rocks fall, everyone dies' trope in tabletop RPGS'.)

The ending in which The Narrator kills you is known by the community as the Hostile ending. The fact that the ending resides in the Malevolence-Satisfaction quadrant isn't a new discovery, but the way that The Narrator's hostile state 'tilts' other endings towards the quadrant is new. The mood modifier of the Countdown, Alone, Mariella, Apartment, Museum, Repetition, Failure and Incompetent endings will shift towards the Satisfaction end of the spectrum the higher Malevolence is. This 'shift' also happens to the Freedom, Serious and Games endings, but they shift towards the Malevolence side of the spectrum. The Countdown ending's mood modifier appears to reside where the Freedom ending is as you get closer and closer to infinite Malevolence. Since you average the ending mood modifier with the current mood of The Narrator after an ending, playing through a Countdown ending at infinite Malevolence would result in your Malevolence cut in half, so ending mood modifier modification (say that ten times fast) is more of an afterthought than an exploitable characteristic. The Narrator also has a generous state as a counterpart to his hostile state, (when Benevolence is greater than 4.8i), and in this state the Games, Victory, Leave, Freedom, Hoarder, and Genocide endings rotate towards the Benevolent side of the spectrum.

The Narrator won't remove modifications from you unless you condition Malevolence past -2.5i. As a result, it's possible to survive The Narrator's onslaught of cosmic bad luck that he directs at you. If you have the 'interact with objects' or the 'gun/crowbar' modifications, this can be done by destroying/interacting with the objects he throws at you. Other modifications are always helpful (or mandatory), like the 'open all doors' or the 'jump' ones, since The Narrator can always block your progress. For those of you familiar with the narrow realm of Status exploits, you might think they'd work well, but the benefits are miniscule and not really worth investing hours of time into. The abs side effect from the Demo ending might work better, since it offers a more permanent modification to Stanley's Status.

Conditioning Malevolence to invoke the hostile state in The Narrator allows you to find areas colloquially known as Safe Zones. These are areas that The Narrator can't influence. The one past the boss's office was discovered first; after inputting the code in the boss's office, The Narrator will open the chimney, but he'll usually ram it shut as you pass through, killing you instantly. If you survive that using a modification (you can get past without a modification if you're lucky) he'll start causing havoc to the maintenance area before the elevator, but if you head to the dark area to the right you'll be able to nestle yourself into a crevice where he can't reach you.

Here's a list of confirmed safe zones:

The crevice past the boss's office to the right

Underneath the four architect's desks inside the lift room (you need to crouch to reach them)

The small passageway between the room with the truck and the top catwalk of the monitor room

The room at the top of the stairs that leads to the roof

The small passageway between the fern room and door #426 (this also demonstrates that The Narrator invoking the LineTM is a technique with different restrictions than him going after Stanley in a hostile state; the LineTM can reach this area, but The Narrator can't)

The executive bathroom

The entirety of the Heaven map

Room #427 is also a sort of safe zone; The Narrator will never interact with this room or try to kill Stanley in it. It's theorized that this is because The Narrator wants to avoid destroying Stanley's computer, which would destroy your computer in real life.

The current consensus is that The Narrator can't see areas unless you're currently in them. For example, he doesn't see The Schedule until you walk past the circular two doors room, he can't see the stairs in the Zending until you reach them, and he can't see certain things in the Games endings until you reach them, too. To be clear, he does know, to a certain extent, what's in which direction; he's aware of what's in the Freedom ending route, what's past the blue door before you reach it, etcetera. The Safe Zones are areas that The Narrator can't see, even if you're in them. There's debate over whether or not the museum and the dilapidated office in the Games ending are all a type of Safe Zone, as well. These zones don't seem to have any explanation within the game, and The Narrator is quite confused when you duck into one, so some in the community classify it as a glitch. Anyways, waiting in one spot will raise Dissatisfaction, and it will bring Benevolence/Malevolence towards an equilibrium state of 0, although this effect is much less pronounced. As a result, you can trigger the hostile state for part of a run, and then hide in a Safe Zone until the Malevolence wears off. The time it takes to wear off varies, so you may need to wait for a while; if the Malevolence is at -0.96875i (the theoretical exact value of iterating 5 Countdown endings), this shouldn't be longer than about thirty minutes.

Stepping on the cargo lift in the lift room always results in it snapping and falling, so the 128, Art, Critic, Demo Apartment, Void, and Real Person endings aren't accessible in The Narrator's hostile state unless someone wants to try screwing around with 'being spiders'. I wouldn't push my luck with side effects here; I don't think you want to find out what happens if The Narrator decides not to save you using the dance/disagree method. The Zending and Games endings are accessible, but they're very different from normal (more on this in a bit).

If your Dissatisfaction and Malevolence are both high, The Narrator isn't invested enough in your experience to invoke the LineTM during the Confusion and Disoriented endings, so The Schedule ends them prematurely. If your Dissatisfaction isn't high, The Narrator will lead you in different directions during the restart that the LineTM was supposed to arise in. Again, The Schedule ends things prematurely.

As I mentioned above, conditioning Benevolence past 4.8i leads to The Narrator's 'generous' state, in contrast to his 'hostile state. In this state, The Narrator will try and avoid Stanley's death. For example, he'll offer you a more thorough warning in the lift room, although the death zone is still there. If you pick up the phone to try and reach the Apartment ending, The Narrator will instead recite the 'script' dialogue, and he'll restart the game instead of transferring you to the Apartment. ("As Stanley picked up the phone, a white light engulfed him, filling him not just with radiance, but with hope.") If you try again, The Narrator will show you the apartment, but instead of reciting his 'death of a man named Stanley' story, he'll open the fridge and offer you something to eat. Incidentally, The Narrator will give you food if you're on the brink of starving to death, too; this, like the lounge modification from the Games ending, is relevant for a thing called Status, which will come in a future section. If you attempt to reach the Countdown ending, the 'ON' button is unable to be pressed, and The Narrator will claim that it's broken. He'll reprimand you for trying to turn the machine on, and then open the door so you can backtrack all the way to the lift room and then reach the Leave ending. The Freedom ending isn't accessible anymore once you press the 'ON' button, which means this choice is a true choice and doesn't lead to Narrative Contradiction.

**12C - CROUCHING EXPLOITS, AND THE ANNOYED, REPETITION, AND SURVIVE ENDINGS**

If you crouch next to certain objects, The Narrator will stop to describe or comment on them. For instance, crouching near doors will cause The Narrator to describe the fact that they're locked, or he'll make something up about how Stanley can hear noises behind the door, or that he can feel a draft underneath it. Crouching near objects, such as the spilled cup in the office, will cause similar results. These descriptions are different if The Narrator's mood is different. His descriptions will be more intricate if Dissatisfaction is high, and he may fail to comment on anything if Satisfaction is high, or if his mood is close to 0. If you're in The Narrator's generous state, he will open doors for you to investigate if you crouch near them. He'll lead you through a backrooms path of varying length; this will either lead back to the standard route, or to another ending (most commonly the Leave ending). One exception is door #428, which The Narrator will never open. You can open doors in this way once per run; if you try more than once, The Narrator will express annoyance and scold you for trying to derail the story. This probably sounds bad, but you can use it in a few interesting ways, such as opening the metal shutters at the bottom of the maintenance section. If you crouch next to papers when Benevolence is in this state, The Narrator will stop to read them aloud, which is interesting, but not something that was impossible to do using noclip and creative camera angles. If you crouch next to the vending machine for about a minute, The Narrator will drop a can of soda from it, claiming that 'Stanley spent about a minute trying to get a can from inside the vending machine, even though he didn't have any money. When a long time had passed and he was finally fed up with attempting to commit petty crime, he kicked the machine, which rewarded him with a refreshing beverage.'

If you try and reach the Museum ending during the generous state, The Narrator simply won't open the 'door' into the shaft that leads downwards. If you crouch near it, he'll concede and allow you to fall into the new map. He'll demonstrate the crushing plates that would have killed you, and then he'll leave you to restart the game as an alternative to killing you. If you then crouch inside the metal cage with at least -0.88 Dissatisfaction, The Narrator will ask you what you're looking at and state that there's nothing there. Eventually, The Narrator will figure out how to open the latch on the cage, but before you hit the catwalk, the game restarts on its own abruptly. The community believes that this is for the same reason that the game restarts during the Escape ending, which is to say, it's because of The Schedule's intervention. Evidence of this is that The Narrator's mood value won't change after this variant of the Museum ending, which is consistent with the Confusion, Disoriented, and Escape endings, the first two of which are caused by The Schedule. More on this in the Escape ending's chapter.

The effects of crouching in The Narrator's generous state are inverted if you're in his hostile state. For example, doors that you crouch near will fall on top of Stanley. This usually won't kill Stanley, so you'll actually be able to open a lot more doors using Malevolence than Benevolence; this isn't really useful while The Narrator is hostile, though, and both of these are put to shame by the 'open all doors' modification. If you try and read papers, The Narrator will usually make something up about how Stanley's eyesight is terrible, or he'll say that the paper is directly insulting him, or that he can't read. If you try and get a can of soda from the vending machine, The Narrator will instead claim that Stanley's arm is trapped in the machine. You won't be able to move (you can still stop crouching) and you'll be forced to listen as The Narrator describes how Stanley starves to death in the lounge because he can't get his arm out and nobody is around to help him. The Narrator relishes in the fact that Stanley will die alone, and then leaves Stanley to restart the game himself, in an ending colloquially known as the Alone ending.

If you crouch next to the fence on the first platform of the lift room while in The Narrator's hostile state, he'll drop the fence on you. You can then crouch near the architect's desks to make The Narrator's hostile state wear off, and then investigate the two doors past the fence. The right-hand door leads back to the cafeteria zone and one of the doors at the bottom of the lift room. The left-hand door leads to a map loading zone, but before you reach that it allows you to access the small office above the room with door #2B3; it's an innocuous room that you pass through on your way to the red/blue doors room.

Firstly, if you don't choose to let The Narrator's hostile state wear off, you can break the glass in this office using the jump/attack modifications and then climb out to reach the red/blue doors room. This is how you reach the Games/Zending endings with a Malevolence of greater than -0.95i. If you take the blue door, you can reach the catwalk in the 'dev texture' room. The Narrator will go through his typical Games ending path (you won't gain a modification if you rate it 5, though), until you reach the portion of the ending with the baby game. He'll instead load the metal crusher map from the Museum ending; unlike in that ending, Stanley isn't freed by The Curator, and is crushed by the plates. This ending is considered a different variant of the Museum ending, since it also has a mood value of -0.866, -0.5i. If you also have a high Dissatisfaction value in conjunction with a high Malevolence value, he'll skip the 'ratings/baby game' area altogether and play through the Games ending as normal, but some situations will be much more difficult (for instance, Minecraft will be played at night, and monsters will start spawning). The Narrator will relish watching you flee and squirm at these unfair challenges, although this will be slightly dampened if you have a way to fight back. The bonus chance to get the Demo ending, incidentally, appears to drop to zero if you're in The Narrator's hostile state; thus far, no hostile-state Demo ending has ever been observed. If you enter the red door, The Narrator will instead describe the Zending room as a way to keep you occupied while The Narrator does something more productive with his time. He won't be concerned for your happiness, although he may give some hints that he thinks the room is beautiful. When you start throwing yourself off the platform, The Narrator will observe your behavior and relish in it. You can finish the ending normally; just like in the normal version of the Zending, there's no mood value, and The Narrator doesn't seem to recall the past ending. If you follow the original path through the left door after the fence falls instead of finding the red/blue doors room, you'll enter into a map change and find a separate chunk of the office. At the end of the path, there's a room with a large projector connected to a computer. The Narrator prompts you to interact with the computer; when you do, the projector will show a list of all the endings you've accomplished during your time playing The Stanley Parable. This list is limited, and each entry in the list contains the following:

  1. A short blurb about what Stanley did,
  2. the duration of the run, and
  3. the cause of the ending.



If The Narrator's hostile state is active, he will present this list with malice and reveal that he's played a key part in this cycle; then he kills you to ensure that Stanley cycles through the game again. If he isn't hostile, he'll instead narrate Stanley's shock, his growing resolve to break the cycle, and his determination to survive at all costs to prevent another restart from happening. Of course, after this, a restart happens. These two endings are described differently on the list, and they also have a different 'cause of ending' and different mood values, so they're classified as the Repetition and Survive endings respectively.

Here's a list of all ending blurbs:

**Freedom (Restart)**

Stanley followed The Narrator and left the facility happy

**Countdown (Death)**

Stanley tried to turn on the Mind Control Facility

**Games (Restart)**

Stanley disobeyed The Narrator, so he loaded up <game 1> and <game 2> to try and appeal to Stanley's capricious sensibilities

(this can vary depending on things; you can die in this, and also beat some of the games, which qualifies as the **Victory** ending)

**Art (Restart)**

Stanley disobeyed The Narrator but made up for it by playtesting his masterpiece.

**Demo (Restart)**

Stanley disobeyed The Narrator, so he tried to prove the worth of The Stanley Parable by showing Stanley the demo

**Critic (Death)**

Stanley disobeyed The Narrator, and is so disgusted by his new game that he ended it all

**128 (Restart)**

Stanley fell in love with developer textures

**Apartment (Death)**

Stanley tried to find his wife, until The Narrator revealed that she doesn't exist

**Cold Feet (Death)**

A lift left Stanley behind, so he ended it all

**Powerful, Incompetent (Death)**

Stanley failed to live up to his own expectations

**Potent, Failure (Death)**

Stanley chickened out of the story

**Coward (Restart)**

Stanley didn't leave his office

**Window, Void (Restart)**

Stanley fell out of the world

**Serious (Restart)**

Stanley tried to cheat

**Mariella (Death)**

Stanley went insane

**Survive (Restart)**

Stanley found out he's stuck in a loop

**Repetition (Death)**

Stanley found out he's stuck in a loop, and The Narrator kills him to prolong his suffering

**Museum (Death)**

Stanley disobeyed The Narrator and was crushed by metal plates

**Starvation (Death)**

Stanley starved to death

**Hostile (Death)**

Stanley died

**Hoarder (Restart)**

Stanley followed The Narrator, but was forced to give up his material possessions in the end

**Trapped (Restart)**

Stanley got stuck in an elevator

**Leave (Restart)**

Stanley <reason is variable>, so he left the office

**Alone (Restart)**

Stanley's arm was caught in a vending machine

**Genocide (Restart)**

Stanley followed The Narrator, but made sure to satiate his destructive urges

**Broom Closet (Restart/Death depending on the actual ending)**

Stanley entered the broom closet and stood there for a long time, because his mental capabilities have deteriorated beyond the point of reconciliation

**Annoyed (Death)**

Stanley made a point to annoy The Narrator

**Restarting the game using the menu (Restart)**

Stanley restarted the game

The **Confusion, Real Person, Escape, Zending, Heaven, and Disoriented** endings do not appear at all.

~~DID U GET THE BROOM CLOSET ENDING? THEB ROOM~~ No, this doesn't mean the Broom Closet ending is real. The broom closet description is incorporated into the actual blurb you were supposed to get. The fact that there's a jab at Stanley in the broom closet description, as well as the fact that the endings that don't appear are the ones that The Narrator doesn't remember, seems to indicate that this list is something The Narrator has created or is in possession of. The Narrator also doesn't express surprise if he's currently in a hostile state, but there aren't any endings listed that would have given Malevolence (in other words, if you've modified the game files). This implies that his mood values are something hidden from him or that he isn't fully aware of. ~~~~

Let's change the topic back to crouching. Crouching can be combined with a Dissatisfaction of at least -0.95 to achieve a new ending, the Annoyed ending. You have to crouch next to something (this can be anything mundane, like a door, a desk, a chair, etc.) for at least ten minutes in the following rooms:

Stanley's office

The first room of the office

The small passageway with door #417 (in this one, you don't crouch; instead, you close the doors in the passageway and look through the window)

The lounge

The meeting room (in other words, take the right door and then detour through the maintenance section)

The broom closet

The boss's office

Each platform in the monitor room

The end of the facility power room

The Narrator gets increasingly exasperated at each of these points, although he never gets frustrated enough to leave you alone (he acts like he does during many parts, the most familiar of which is the broom closet). After doing all this and wasting over 90 minutes, press the 'ON' button in the facility power room. This will infuriate The Narrator, who will demand to know why you dragged him along this ride just to disobey him at the last second. He'll then decide to teach you a lesson by blowing up the facility immediately; after the restart, The Narrator will be in his hostile state unless you had some Benevolence saved up.

**12D - ADDITIONAL STRANGE VALUES**

There are more odd ways to manipulate the axis_value_onstart.txt file. Firstly, what happens if you insert a value such as 'infinity', '∞', or 'lim x -> +0 (1/x)'? After pressing 'BEGIN THE GAME', the opening cutscene will begin, but The Narrator won't go through his usual dialogue at all. Instead, you'll typically hear him begin to become overwhelmed with emotions, accompanied by a lot of suspicious scuffling noises (the same sort you can hear during the Confusion, Disoriented, and Real Person endings). He'll then accuse you of cheating or tampering with the files in some way, and hastily send you to the Serious room. After this moment, he'll leave you alone until you quit the game; if you try restarting, you'll just be sent back to the Serious room again. It's a very surreal scene, kind of reminiscent of what happens to Sayori if you delete Monika at the very start of that other ~ATH game, DDLC. There are a few alternate possibilities, though; a considerable probability is one where he will quit The Stanley Parable entirely, which is something he usually only does in extreme circumstances, i.e. during a side effect. In another, you'll see him, during the opening cutscene, destroy Stanley's computer, which _will destroy your computer in real life_. It's also, to our knowledge, the only circumstance where he'll do this.

0/0 is an expression that could equal anything. For example, 0/0 = 3 is valid, since 0 = 3*0. This and similar values result in a different sort of Narrator malfunction. Instead of becoming overwhelmed with emotions, The Narrator will erratically flipflop between all possible mood states. This ends up working quite well narratively; The Narrator will often try and kill you, only to then apologize profusely and prevent your death in other ways. You won't be able to use modifications in this state, since The Narrator takes them away if your Malevolence is over -2.5i. Eventually, The Narrator will become suspicious about the fact that something is changing his mood arbitrarily. He may accuse you and send you to the Serious room, or he may restart the game and then quit the game when there's no change. A really weird and out of place third possibility is one where he considers the possibility of a foreign entity, usually described by him as a ghost or demon; you will then be prompted to perform an esoteric series of tasks described by The Narrator as an exorcism. I wish I was kidding. Strangely, despite all the weirdness going on, these tasks are _always the same_ , which means The Narrator actually _has a list of exorcism instructions sitting around somewhere in the game directory_. You'd think he'd just be making shit up by this point, but, no, he apparently has a list of exorcism instructions that involve:

  1. Standing on top of boxes
  2. Crouching on a stairwell and walking backwards while strafing left and right
  3. Shaking your head while looking outside a window
  4. Crouching while shaking your head
  5. Walking in circles while crouching
  6. Staring at the photocopier for 30 seconds
  7. Staring at the vending machine in the lounge for 27 seconds
  8. Letting the vending machine in the lounge stare at you for 27 seconds
  9. Turning your back to the vending machine out of reverence
  10. Walking in and out of the small hallway outside of door #417 five times



A discovery regarding these instructions that was made quite recently is that they're actually taken from page 12 of the 2897 page directory of instructions that was found by the second person to ever attain the 'UNDERSTANDING EXACTLY WHAT THIS GAME IS AND HOW IT PLAYS AND WHAT YOU DO AND HOW YOU WIN AND THEN DELETING IT OFF YOUR HARD DRIVE AND DOING SOMETHING ELSE' side effect. Incidentally, another page of this list happens to be the list of instructions he asks you to do for the '430' achievement. This is an active topic of investigation, and I encourage you to check out new developments (<https://forums.dokidokihackerverse.net/t/enlightenment-side-effect-list-investigations/62611?u>).

It seems that The Narrator doesn't have, or has lost, the rest of the pages of this exorcism list. When these tasks end up being fruitless, The Narrator quits the game, apologizing to Stanley for his strange disposition, but also saying he deserves to be dissatisfied, and then apologizing again for that outburst. Anyways, finding values for this behavior has a key nuance. 0/0 is valid for all complex numbers, which allows all combinations of Malevolence, Benevolence, Satisfaction, and Dissatisfaction. Something with valid solutions in the real axis only, such as arcsin(0.5) or i^i, will only yield erratic behavior with regards to real numbers - that is to say, Satisfaction and Dissatisfaction. It turns out the 'exorcism' route is linked to Dissatisfaction, while the 'serious room' route is linked to Malevolence, and the 'quit the game' one is linked to Benevolence.

Satisfaction is linked to 'doing nothing', and this can be demonstrated if you combine some of these indeterminate values. For instance, if you type in -|0/0|, you'll cause The Narrator's possible moods to be restricted to the bottom left quadrant of the moods; that is to say, the one with Dissatisfaction and Malevolence. If you then type in something like (arcsin(0.5)*-i)-|0/0|, you'll be able to reach the Benevolence-Dissatisfaction quadrant alongside this. The Narrator requires at least two quadrants of erratic behavior to become suspicious; without Satisfaction, he becomes suspicious immediately instead of dallying around.

By the way, trigonometric functions all default to radians. You can type something really messy in like sin_of_0.5_in_degrees to get what you need, but I don't know why you'd need to differentiate between degrees and radians here ~~, other than the fact that degrees is clearly the superior choice and anyone who disagrees is a snobbish math nerd and will perish in the great degrees-radians conflict of the future, also known as World War π~~.

A truly undefined value, such as 1/0 or tan(pi/2), can't be equal to anything in our grid of moods. When you plug this into the game, it will cause The Narrator to be removed from The Stanley Parable entirely. This isn't unique to this mood; you can remove The Narrator through other mechanisms, such as through the Escape ending, but using a mood of 1/0 is the only known way to remove The Narrator while The Schedule isn't set to a specific ending. This allows you to reach endings without The Schedule restarting the game, but it also prevents you from doing other exploits; more details will come in chapter 16.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This one had a ton of details to keep track of so if you discover something that doesn't make sense, let me know in the comments. This also has a graph with all the supposedly 'discovered' endings, so if there are any new ones that canonically would have been discovered by this point I will have to go back and add them.
> 
> also that reminds me I need to go back and edit chapter 5, since that also had a list of all 'discovered' endings. RIP


	13. Backrooms and Terrain Weirdness

**13A - BACKROOMS PREFACE**

If you examine the .bsp maps within The Stanley Parable using Source's Hammer editor, you'll find several map 'segments' detached from each other; for example, the alternate starting offices, the non-Euclidian office areas from the Confusion ending, and several parts of the Games ending. It's believed that the way The Stanley Parable creates a coherent map is by creating a 'portal' of sorts between the end of one section and the beginning of another, the same way any other Source game would do this. When The Narrator's Cognizance was discovered and backrooms sections were explored, it became clear that the .bsp files within the file system aren't the only thing the game relies on.

The 'dilapidated office' found underneath the Portal and Please Don't Touch Anything games during the Games ending give the first clue that there's something else going on here. It's a half-built version of the office, with exposed floor panels, tarps, and measurements. There are sections of the area that are constructed out of the 'exposed developer textures' panels, and some panels are partially painted over. All of this is inundated with large geometrical structures lined with 'Please Rate Your Experience' signs. Similar imagery can be seen in the promotional trailer for the game (which, by the way, can be seen in the Museum ending); there are rows of chairs being moved, a beta version of a 'The Stanley Parable' sign with panels missing, and half-built versions of the Apartment ending and the baby game can be seen. Why would a video game that insists so frequently on referencing the fact that it's a video game have this type of imagery? Video games don't require environments to be physically constructed out of actual materials. Why would this area have so many of these rating signs? This clearly isn't some kind of lore-based decision, like the monitor room's aesthetic. At this point in the Games ending, The Narrator has completely shattered the fourth wall already. Why are these details included?

This also casts some innocuous details from other parts of the game in a new light. The dedication the game has in preserving damage done to the environment becomes suspicious. The detail that it puts into portraying The Adventure LineTM as a physical object by having it destroy ceiling panels during the Confusion ending is strange. The types of terrain destruction that Narrative Contradiction causes, particularly at the end of the right door sub-ending of the Real Person ending, is odd. These are all details that become suspicious when you realize that they're contradicting the underlying 'narrative' that The Narrator (and The Curator, for that matter) gives us about this environment, i.e. that it is a video game environment. They're all pointing towards the conclusion that there's something more 'real' about this environment than we previously thought.

**13B - JUST WHO IS THIS 'NARRATOR', ANYWAYS? PART 2**

Let's discuss a few things about The Narrator. What is The Narrator's primary motivation during The Stanley Parable? The Narrator is clearly invested in getting you to follow the Freedom ending path, but there's other trends he expresses over the course of the game that are important. Examine the following dialogue, and specifically the sections I have italicized:

"Was it worth ruining the entire story I had written out specifically for you? Do you not think _I put a lot of time into that?_ Because I did."

Games ending. Dialogue is fairly consistent, since deviations in dialogue during the Games ending typically happen after this point.

"He'll understand soon what I was trying to tell him. He needs me, someone who will wrap everything up at the end - to _make sense out of the chaos and the fear and the confusion. That's who I am._ That is what I mean to this world."

Games ending. Dialogue can vary, but a variant of this occurs more often than not, as long as you get Portal as your game 2.

"How can I get him to see what I see? How can I make him look at himself? I suppose I can't, not in the way I want him to. But _I don't make the rules, I simply play to my intended purpose_ , the same as Stanley. We're not so different, I suppose. I'll try once more to convey all this to him. I'm compelled to. I must."

Apartment ending. The Narrator's 'Death of a man named Stanley' story is consistent across many runs, so this dialogue is, as well.

"Do something! Anything. This is more important than you can ever know. _I need this. The story needs it_."

Real Person ending. Inconsistent dialogue, but The Narrator's general mood at the very end usually has the same tones of desperation.

To assume that The Narrator is a reliable descriptor of his own intentions axiomatically would be naïve, but if we go off of this dialogue (along with other pieces interspersed throughout the game, especially in the Confusion and Disoriented endings when he's trying to find the story) we can reach the following conclusions:

  1. The Narrator's function is to provide you/Stanley with a _meaningful experience_. This most often takes the form of a story, but the Zending and Games endings show that this isn't necessarily the case.
  2. The Narrator submits to or is constrained by a fundamental set of rules or functions, which likely includes his attraction towards a ' _meaningful experience_ '.
  3. The Narrator has spent time and effort creating meaningful paths for Stanley.



Consider #3 for a moment. We already have evidence to believe The Narrator has memories and experience running a version of The Stanley Parable Demonstration. What's to say that he doesn't also have experience running test versions of The Stanley Parable? Perhaps the 'Alpha' versions of the office underneath the Portal map are the remnants of these experiences, which also explains the imagery seen in the trailer. During the Countdown ending, The Narrator says "sometimes I let the office sink into the ground, swallowing everyone inside, or I let it burn to a crisp". This makes no sense if you do a Countdown ending as a first run, but the 'prior testing' explanation explains the quote; he has had test experiences with beta testers in which he's done these things.

The 'fundamental set of rules' that The Narrator is constrained by likely includes the rule of 'allowing the player choice'. In The Stanley Parable, even when you're on a path that leads to only one ending, The Narrator almost always gives you the choice to restart before reaching it. In the Apartment and Freedom endings, you have to walk forwards into the apartment/out the door to trigger the ending; in the Window ending, you have to choose between YES and NO; in the Cold Feet ending, you can choose to restart instead of jumping off. Even in situations where you aren't given a choice before The Narrator restarts, such as the Countdown, Coward, Mariella, Confusion, Survive and Repetition endings, he goes on lengthy soliloquies that stretch on and on and on, giving you ample time to restart the game before he finishes. In the Countdown ending, there's even a _countdown_ to let you know how much time you have left to restart the game. This seems to be a rule that The Narrator is compelled to follow almost always.

There's a few notable exceptions. The Powerful, Incompetent, Potent, and Failure endings don't have long, drawn out speeches from The Narrator. It may be that Stanley's death supersedes the 'choice to restart' rule, and is instead just a 'condition that forces a restart'. Regardless, this hypothesis may explain why The Narrator can't stop you from killing yourself during the Zending ending; he has to provide you with an alternative to the choice of 'waiting', even if it's against his own interests.

It's clear that The Narrator has a bone to pick with the idea of giving the player choices. It’s easy to see why, given point #1. The Narrator has to give you choices in order for the experience to be meaningful, but oftentimes the experience can't be meaningful unless you make the right choices. If you have the choice to go through the right door, and you pick the left door and head to the Freedom ending, are you doing it of your own volition, or because The Narrator told you to? This is one of the fundamental issues The Stanley Parable investigates philosophically, and it's clearly one The Narrator is faced with as an adjudicator of the game environment.

With all of this in mind, here's a second round of queries about The Narrator:

\- Can The Narrator see past doors?

Almost certainly **No.** He doesn't know what's past door #437, gets confused about where things are during the Confusion/Dilapidated routes, and doesn't know there are stairs past the Zending ending. The current understanding is that The Narrator has a map of the game which is less clear in backrooms areas and more clear in areas like the Freedom ending path.

\- Did The Narrator create The Stanley Parable?

**Inconclusive** , Likely **No**. He doesn't know about core things in the game, and he's obviously not responsible for creating the game itself. The way he talks about 'the story', the fact that he knows the office fairly well aside from the above points, and the fact that there's a lot of imagery depicting him 'constructing' the game environments leads to a few possibilities. 1. This is all a smokescreen, and The Narrator isn't responsible for anything, 2. The Narrator was given some basic tools and constructed most of the game himself, or 3. someone or something else created the game environment and story (e.g. Wreden) and programmed The Narrator to feel responsible for it. The basic narrative threads of The Stanley Parable were around in the HL2 mod, so it's pretty safe to say that The Narrator didn't create those first. He may have simply been given some of the script, or perhaps he came up with it independently. Maybe The Narrator was initially given the HL2 mod environment in the form of the very bottom of the Portal map and this nudged him in the right direction.

\- Can The Narrator create new rooms and areas?

Almost certainly **Yes.** There are some limitations to what he can create. It seems as though he's restricted to a few strange models (e.g. the brick wall in the Apartment ending, the weird looking door in the Games ending if you get the three doors modification), and can only use developer textures to construct other things. This may simply reflect what we've seen him do, rather than the extent of his abilities. A theory that's been bouncing around is that The Narrator can use developer textures, but he has to physically construct the office textures using paint and other unorthodox 'real' mechanisms. This explains why there's paint on the dev textures in the portal map, and it explains the circumstantial evidence in promotional material and the other 'real office' hints. There's no clear motive for this to be the case, though, so this theory is unconfirmed.

\- Can The Narrator create copies of locations?

Almost certainly **Yes.** He creates a copy of the two doors room during the Games ending and he's able to copy over objects in room #427 during the Apartment ending. There's also the fact that there are copies of the office in the Escape ending and in a version of the Confusion ending, which demonstrates that copying terrain is a thing that can be done. Of course, stating that these were made by The Narrator would be irresponsible because there's no evidence for this.

\- Can The Narrator cause doors to lead to other locations?

**Inconclusive.** Everything he does that involves leading Stanley in certain directions can be explained by the 'map' theory. If he can't manipulate where doors lead, it would explain why he gives long soliloquies before an ending restart; he can't change doors to give you new paths, but his narration and the length of time before the restart happens is something he can control.

**13C - BACKROOMS**

Here's the cliffnotes version of how terrain generation in this game works. There are a set amount of resources (rooms, hallways, doors, etc) that the game can draw on per map. This set of resources appears to _roughly correspond_ with the .bsp map files within the file directory. These files are, in all probability, illusory and only exist to obscure whatever fundamental map structure the game uses. Here's a list of the .bsp maps and how they correspond to 'actual' map changes in the game:

**babygame, blockbase, testchmb_a_00**

These correspond to the games that The Narrator loads in the Games ending. The .bsp maps exclude all other games, and they exclude Please Don't Touch Anything 3D, which is linked to testchmb_a_00 anyways.

**map1, map_one, thefirstmap, theonlymap, map, incorrect, freedom**

The standard Stanley Parable office. The Confusion and Real Person endings have variants of this map as .bsp files. The monitor room can be encountered during the Confusion and Disoriented endings, but it can also be encountered if you trek far enough within the backrooms.

**map2, map_two**

The monitor room map. There appears to be two copies of the monitor room, one in the office, and one in this map. This isn't exactly revolutionary; there's copies of the office in the Escape ending map, after all.

**map_death**

The map containing the Museum ending.

**redstair**

The map containing the Escape ending.

**serious**

The map containing the Serious ending; this also contains The Stanley Parable Demonstration Construction Facility, as well as the section of the map with the Survive and Repetition endings. More on this map later.

**zending**

The map containing the Zending ending.

**buttonworld**

The map containing the Heaven ending.

The takeaway here is that although some resources may have copies between maps, you can never _truly_ cross between two maps without receiving a map change.

Numbered doors will always lead to the same destination; door #427 will always lead to Stanley's office, door #480 will always lead to that small blue office with the nice looking desk, door #428 will always lead to the escape map, etcetera. Non-numbered doors can be consistent, too - I mean, most doors you go through on typical routes are non-numbered, after all - but they can also be changed by The Narrator/other entities. For example, you'll find non-numbered doors after the second restart of the Confusion ending changing their destinations multiple times. Non-numbered doors are also more likely to lead to non-Euclidian weirdness. Even without the 'open all doors' modification, you can see this weirdness in the Zending, Disoriented, Games and Confusion endings. Non-Euclidian weirdness doesn't have a connection to Echelons; you can even see it through windows in the office map during the Freedom ending if you have the 'real environment' modification on. In any case, the terrain in these non-numbered doors appears to be pulled from the pool of resources that the current map has; these resources are stitched together in a procedural fashion. This is what happens when you start exploring off the rails. This procedural generation does have some links; for example, after leaving the monitor room from the door at the bottom, you'll be in a procedurally generated area, but you'll always be able to get back to the lift room from it. In addition, you can use this procedural generation to reach other areas, such as the lift room from the office, and if you're using an exploit that The Narrator expects you to have (like the 'open all doors' modification) then you'll be able to skip straight there without invoking Narrative Contradiction. This isn't exactly a timesaver, and it doesn't work for all doors in a map, unfortunately.

Although numbered doors always lead to the same destination, there are some quirks to keep in mind. For example, they can also have non-Euclidian strangeness that varies between runs. To reconcile this disparity, it appears that if a numbered door does have non-Euclidian behavior, this behavior will never generate extra doors. For example, although door #437 will always lead to the circular two-doors room, it'll have non-Euclidian strangeness of varying length. This strange section won't ever have other doors that could lead you away from the circular two-doors room. Another quirk involves numbered doors with multiple entrances and exits. For instance, doors #425 and #426 exist in the normal office and in the 'extremely short' variant of the office. If you enter through #425 in the short variant and go all the way to #426, you may end up in either office variant. You can use this property to enter other zones of the office, such as entering the Notes room from the short office via door #424. Door #452 also exhibits this strange behavior, because the office it leads to has only one door, but it can be entered through two ways. Sometimes you can exploit the system by closing and opening the door multiple times, although whether or not this works seems to be entirely random and doesn't have a discernable pattern. Sometimes the door will swap between destinations or it'll simply maintain the same one. Although numbered doors may have multiple variants, they're still more reliable than the procedural generation that non-numbered doors undergo.

Because of the geometry-preserving properties of numbered doors, we can construct a rough 'map' of the office, divided into submaps to help descriptively. You can see the fine detail of the map here (<https://forums.dokidokihackerverse.net/t/backrooms-map/61798?u>), but here's a _very simplified_ idea of the layout:

To get an idea of the numbers, doors 400-600 appear to reside in the office map, while the 300s are in the monitor map, the 200s are in the serious-demo map, the 100s are in the portal map, and what we know of the 000s are in the office map. Right now, #004-#005, #039-#150, #188-#191, #246-#348, #377-#390, #398-#405, #457-#466, #500-#511, #517-#544, and #579-#600 are as of yet undiscovered. The community is assuming that all of these doors exist and that the span of numbered doors ranges from #000 to #600, which is what the monitor room would have us believe. Under this assumption, the amount of doors found is around 50%. There's also the xBy series of doors (#2B3, #0B5, etc.); These doors don't have monitor room analogues; they don't have any special properties among the numbered doors, although they are always hallways rather than true offices.

Numbered doors with multiple entrances or exits can also exhibit one-way behavior. Specifically, the doors in the escape and portal maps that link to normal doors in the office map display this property. You can go through them to get back to the office, but you can't turn around and go back to the portal or escape maps. The shared numbers between the portal and serious-demo maps can be walked between easily, so that's a legitimate 'number door' shortcut. Door #456 can also be used as a way to get back to the starting office after going past the right door, although you can just as easily do this by backtracking. It's useful if you're using Benevolence to bypass doors instead of the 'open all doors' modification, I suppose. Incidentally, doors #001, #002, and #003 are empty when you open them in the Museum ending. It's possible that they simply _aren't linked_ to a destination at all, but the community has speculated that their behavior is because the only other doors with those numbers are one-way. If anyone could find a second copy of those doors it could allow you to enter the Museum with The Narrator; whether or not The Schedule would be initialized by this point isn't known, but you'd be departing significantly from the normal Museum path, so we're confident that it won't be and it won't restart the game.

Remember the terrain destruction that modifications like the gun and crowbar can cause? It turns out that you can cause a lot of problems if you destroy or damage the number on a door. The number on a door is relevant for where a door leads, and it turns out that damaging it will affect this property. A damaged numeral/numerals will turn itself into a '?' as interpreted by the game. You'll notice that doors with the '?' digit are available in the game in two places: in the confusion map area you'll find #4?8, and in the list area of the serious-demo map you'll find #3?4. Both of these doors take the place of their xBy counterparts (#4?8 replaces #4B8, and #3?4 replaces #3B4, which aren't available anywhere). The belief is that this is a glitch or oversight and whoever was coding these special xBy doors accidentally screwed up #4B8 and #3B4, resulting in an incorrect digit where a 'B' was supposed to be.

Anyways, doors with 1 '?' digit will lead to a non-Euclidian zone, but they'll contain a consistent hallway every time you go through them. You can test this out yourself by damaging the '2' in door #428 and looking past it, and then following the Confusion route and looking through door #4?8. If you use this to change #001, #002, or #003, you'll be able to explore a non-Euclidian zone in the Museum ending. You can exploit this to escape the Museum by damaging one of the doors in the Confusion ending office, such as door #012 -> #0?2, and then damaging a corresponding door in the Museum. You'll go through a map change when you enter the door in the Museum, entering the office. The Schedule, at this point, may or may not restart the game, depending on if you're able to close/open the door to backtrack back into the Museum or not. If it does restart the game, it'll go through the normal powering down noises followed by the harsh alarm, which is another piece of evidence to confirm the fact that The Schedule is initialized while you're in the Museum. There's still no known way to go from the office directly to the Museum without first going into the Museum using normal methods, so we can't circumvent The Schedule yet. If you're able to circumvent The Schedule restarting, you'll be in the office without The Narrator. The Curator also isn't around; she seems to be restricted to the Museum map, and she doesn't appear to be Cognizant anyways, so she's not really important. Anyways, the Narrator-free office is a state we'll investigate in detail during the Escape ending chapter, since it has the same sort of behavior. One thing I will address now, though, is The Schedule for the Museum ending, because you can trek all the way to door #437 from the Museum in this way and check:

Deviate from the Mind Control Facility door

The Narrator warns Stanley he will die

Stanley falls into a crusher but is saved by a second Narrator

The ON/OFF switch is clicked

Stanley is crushed by metal plates

So, The Curator is an entity The Schedule knows about, and this confirms that she's the one who saves Stanley, meaning she can interact with the environment like The Narrator can. It also explains why The Schedule restarts the game if you use conditioning to get The Narrator to open the metal cage, since this deviates from being saved by The Curator. The use of the word 'clicked' is a bit strange regarding the 'ON/OFF' switch, but is in line with what happens, since you never actually see it turn off; the screen cuts to black as soon as you interact with it. 

With 2 or 3 '?'s you'll find a lot of strange behavior; this also happens when Narrative Contradiction corrupts doors. Any one of the following can occur:

  1. a one-way door to another room on the map
  2. a one-way door to room #427
  3. crashing the game after clicking the door to open it
  4. Narrative Contradiction
  5. The Schedule restarting



The Schedule will restart the game if you modify a door that The Narrator was going to open but that no longer leads to where it should; for example, modifying door #437 or #425 during the Confusion ending. Narrative Contradiction, on the other hand, will appear if you use the technique to add a choice where there shouldn't have been one; if you modify a door that just leads into a small office so that it leads into, say, the lift room, for example. These two can also happen with one '?' doors, although Narrative Contradiction is less likely because you have the 'open all doors' modification and you can always backtrack while you're in the non-Euclidian space. If you use one '?' to get somewhere you aren't supposed to be, like the monitor room, then you'll find Narrative Contradiction.

A word about The Narrator; when you change doors in this way, he'll be incredibly confused and exhibit the same disorientation as he does in the Confusion and Disoriented endings. This makes sense if you recall that The Narrator's (or whatever entity is pulling the strings at the time) knowledge/perception is linked to Narrative Contradiction. He knows how to handle most modifications, but if he doesn't know how to handle '?' doors, then it makes sense that he wouldn't expect them to lead to these strange areas and potentially to new choices; ergo, it makes sense that '? doors can lead to Narrative Contradiction. It also sheds a bit of light as to why Narrative Contradiction doesn't show up if you escape the Museum: The Curator and The Narrator are out of the picture in the office map, so The Schedule is 'the entity has control over the story' and it's a more knowledgeable entity than The Narrator. It probably knows that '?' doors exist and that they exhibit strange behavior. On the other hand, if it does know this, then are '?' doors really a glitch, or are they just another part of the game that seems like a glitch but are an intentional game design?

As an aside, note that rooms with windows are linked geographically to each other, but the door that leads to the room can have a wildly different destination. I mentioned this during the Real Person chapter when door #445 gets corrupted, and it happens during the Disoriented ending with room #425, too.

The being spiders modification is another topic that should go here, because it's been used to reach another section of the map. If you crawl up the sides of the lift room and reach the mysterious catwalk at the top, you'll find that these doors lead to the serious-demo map. Actually, this is how we know about doors #221-#240 from that map in the first place, in RippedPants7's phenomenal Demo exploit run that he documented here (<https://forums.dokidokihackerverse.net/t/backrooms-map/63931?u>). This playthrough also revealed that the keycard door directly below the A2 sign in the lift room leads up to this catwalk. Keycard doors are doors with, obviously, a keycard scanner attached to them. They can't be opened with the 'open all doors' modification, and the only other one we know of is in the red/blue doors room. The non-Euclidian area in this part of the map leads back to the primary #216-#219 doors area where you can reach the Survive/Repetition ending list area. You can't backtrack back to doors #221-#240 from here, similar to how you can't backtrack to door #427 after the second restart of the Confusion ending when that chunk of the office gets replaced by that blue hallway. It's another piece of info to remind you that these non-Euclidian procedurally generated zones _do_ have some structure to them.

Aside from that discovery, there was also a discovery regarding the Window ending recently. You can use the being spiders side effect to climb back up the window, which The Narrator will be a little offended by and ask if the window area was really that disappointing of an ending. After climbing out of the window, you'll find the office inundated with Narrative Contradiction. Additionally, The Schedule will immediately stop the timer, revealing that it's initialized when you jump out of the window. If you use the window closest to door #437 instead of the normal window, and you're _really_ lucky with Narrative Contradiction and with the length of the non-Euclidian area in-between door #437 and the circular two doors room, you can actually make it all the way to The Schedule to find out what the Window schedule is like. Here's what it looks like:

Climb out the window

The Narrator asks if this is fun

Choose Ye(s or No)

(The Narrator) leaves you (to restart the game)

As I've mentioned previously, Narrative Contradiction can corrupt information, and the information stored on The Schedule doesn't seem to be an exception to the rule. The words in brackets are what we believe The Schedule would have said without it being corrupted. The playthrough that spawned this was inspired by the discovery of the Coward ending Schedule, which was actually discovered a while ago. Since you'll be using the 'open all doors' modification to leave room #427, Narrative Contradiction isn't a problem; here's what that schedule looks like:

Close Stanley's door

Stanley is a coward

The Narrator restarts the game

Aside from those two discoveries, nobody's brave enough to experiment further, and I don't blame them. There's plenty of undiscovered things you could do with the being spiders side effect, so I'm going to list topics of interest here.

Leaving the top catwalk of the monitor room during the Confusion ending

The ceiling of room #417

The area at the start of the monitor map

The top of the countdown room

The elevator in the Mariella ending

The tube that drops the Aperture Science Weighted Storage Cube (and perhaps other areas in the Games ending)

The rest of the apartment in the Apartment ending

The keycard door in the red/blue doors room, which is the only other keycard door

The zone outside of the Escape ending catwalk

Pretty much all of the Portal map, including the 'Please Rate Your Experience' area, outside the windows of the beta version of the boss's office, etc…


	14. Vanilla Cheats and the Serious Ending

**14A - VANILLA CHEATS AND THE SERIOUS ENDING**

Here's a short chapter on cheats. In order to enable the console, you have to type '-console' or '-dev console' into the Properties > Launch Options of the game on Steam. Once this is done, you'll be able to open up the console using the tilde ('~') key. No, this isn't a reference to ~ATH; Portal 2 and other Source-based games use the same key as a shortcut to the console, so it's just another case of The Stanley Parable trying to disguise itself as a Source game.

The console uses the same mechanics as the aforementioned Source games, and many of the same commands will work. Firstly, in The Stanley Parable and in those games, you'll need to type in sv_cheats 1 to start things off. In normal circumstances, if you type it in, The Narrator will send you to the Serious room, where he will admonish you for trying to cheat at the game. He'll do this three times when you type it in, but on subsequent attempts The Narrator won't respond. In any case, this room is the Serious ending. The Narrator will, in general, send you here if he suspects you of cheating or tampering with the files in any way. For example, you can reach it by going over the desk maze in the Disoriented ending, as long as The Narrator's mood is conditioned to be at (or below) -0.88, -0.2i. Getting to the Serious room is problematic if you do it without the console and you want the Benevolence boost; the change in mood only happens after the third time you reach the room, which is when the ending technically 'ends'. As a result, you'd need to repeat the Disoriented path thrice to make it work. You can't use sv_cheats 1 to bypass The Schedule and force a restart, even though this qualifies as an ending in and of itself. It's unknown what happens to The Schedule if you type in sv_cheats 1 during its 'set' state; you can't go back and look at it, after all.

Going to the Serious room when you type in sv_cheats 1 will prevent cheats from activating. Any cursory internet search will reveal a remedy to the problem: you need to use the server.dll file from The Stanley Parable Demo. This file, and the corresponding file in the main game, don't contain any ~ATH code, so they aren't hazardous in any way to you; you don't have to worry about your computer exploding or any shenanigans like that. After downloading the demo, you should be able to find it in a file directory like the following:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\The Stanley Parable Demo\thestanleyparabledemo\bin

Take the server.dll file and replace the corresponding server.dll file in the directory of the main game, which should look like the following:

C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\The Stanley Parable\thestanleyparable\bin

I'm actually not sure if file directories are different on Linux or macOS, so to cover my bases, you can access your game files using the Steam application. Just go to the game's Properties, and then to Local Files -> Browse Local Files.

Here are some good commands pulled from The Stanley Parable Wiki:

**bind 5 "ent_fire !picker unlock; ent_fire !picker open"**

opens doors you're looking at when you press '5'.

**bind F "impulse 100"**

creates a flashlight when you press 'F'.

**ent_create_portal_weighted_cube**

creates a storage cube from Portal in the direction you're looking, although it can glitch through walls when you spawn it.

**map [map name]**

teleports you to a map; the map name is the name of the .bsp file, which you can find in 13C.

**noclip**

allows you to clip through walls. Can crash the game.

**raphael**

causes The Narrator to repeat the word 'Stanley.' over and over again.

**bind MWHEELUP "cl_fov 40"; bind MWHEELDOWN "cl_fov 90"**

allows you to zoom in and out using the scroll wheel.

Anyways, the main topic to discuss with cheats is the fake 'pseudo-Source' environment that the game uses when you cheat. It's a hard rule that you can't use cheats to reach new areas or get The Narrator to do anything differently. Activating cheats seems to heavily sedate the ~ATH portions of code for that run, regardless of the cheat. For example, noclip would be great for discovering new sections of the map, going past doors without wasting 4 hours on the baby game, not having to risk people's lives doing side effect exploits, but you'll always find new areas inundated with a white void, even if they're areas that can be reached through normal mechanisms. For example, the area past door #425 is a white void unless you're in the Confusion/Disoriented paths. The door-opening cheat is also a dud; most of the doors it opens don't have anything behind them, despite the fact that they actually do have links to other rooms or maps (like with numbered doors). In adjudicating what should be shown and what should act as though it were missing, the game leans heavily on the .bsp files. You can go outside this zone using exploits and _then_ use cheats, such as in the Survive and Repetition endings, but you'll see the same white void popping up everywhere. Another dud is the ability to spawn in storage cubes, which would be a terrific boon for object manipulation, but you'll reach the white void if you try and access new areas with it.

The Narrator is also (in a more literal sense) sedated; his Cognizance deteriorates to a few scripted lines when you activate cheats, and conditioning exploits are no longer possible. This explains why The Narrator doesn't immediately freak out when you use the 'raphael' cheat, or why he doesn't comment on you noclipping out of the world. He no longer has the cognitive capacity to recognize that something is very wrong.

It's unclear what the role of the server.dll is in all of this, since it's just a standard system file. As long as you don't activate a cheat, the game behaves normally, so it's not as though the standard Stanley Parable server.dll has any magical ~ATH properties that are removed when you replace it with the Demo server.dll file. There's no motivation for the game to 'want' you to be able to use cheats, so it wouldn't make sense for the game to explicitly check which version of the server.dll file you have and adjust its behavior accordingly. On the other hand, if the game doesn't expect you to try cheating, why have the redundancy of 'restriction by white void' in place? The game _does_ give you hints for you to use the console; for example, in the Notes room, you can find a whiteboard hinting at the console command 'bark', which replaces the clicking noise you make when you interact with objects (E or LCLICK) with barking. This is explainable because it puts you on the path towards typing in sv_cheats 1, and getting the Serious ending, which is a certifiable ending with a Cognizant Narrator. The server.dll trick is an extra step entirely from this.

Actually, perhaps the game would want people to do the server.dll trick so that, during their investigation of unblocked cheats, the game can trick them into thinking that the game is a normal Source game. The game has shown that it's motivated to act like a Source game, and the console is structured exactly like a Source game console, so this is at least a _possible_ explanation.


	15. Object Manipulation and the Hoarder and Trapped endings

**15A - OBJECT MANIPULATION**

Object manipulation is an often-overlooked exploit mechanism that makes use of one of the Games ending modifications. Although it's not as useful as the 'open all doors' modification, it does lead to a level of additional environmental maneuverability and it lets you reach a few places you otherwise couldn't have (or would have needed the spiders side effect for).

Stanley can interact with a wide array of objects with the object manipulation modification, such as mugs, cups, soda cans, food items, pencils, markers, clipboards, cardboard boxes, rolls of duct tape, wrenches, screwdrivers, and the Aperture Science Weighted Storage Cube. The goal of object manipulation is usually the creation of staircases or ramps that you can use to access hard-to-reach areas, typically in conjunction with the jump modification. The open all doors modification is essential here as well; Stanley can only carry one object at a time, so you'll need to keep going back and forth between rooms with objects. You might think that, since you can manipulate such a wide variety of objects, you can create staircases of arbitrary size, but this isn't the case. The map you're on draws from a finite pool of pre-constructed rooms and hallways, so Stanley has a limited number of areas he can draw objects from in a single map. Objects also can't be carried over from other maps (with one exception), so this means that there's a limit to how many objects you can use for object manipulation depending on the circumstances.

Cardboard boxes are generally the best object to use for object manipulation in the office. The procedurally generated offices in backrooms areas often come with a box or two that you can use for manipulation, and you can stack them with relative ease due to their flat faces. Additionally, there's a small chance during the beginning of a run that you'll get a phone call from the 'Future Happiness Foundation'. If you answer the phone you'll find that the office is filled with cardboard boxes during the next run. You can create a staircase with boxes in the lift room to get past the fence that you'd normally bypass using The Narrator's hostile state and reach the Survive ending this way. You can also use a paint can to jump off the catwalk in the first bit of the Confusion ending in the monitor room; this won't interrupt The Narrator and he'll still restart the game, which means it doesn't give us any new information about when The Schedule is initialized in that ending.

Object manipulation is the only way (barring spiders) to get to certain places, such as out the windows in the boss's office. They'll lead to some unique Narrator dialogue when you jump out, and typically lead to a Void ending instead of a Window ending.

**15B - DOORS AND RANGED OBJECT MANIPULATION**

Manipulating objects isn't limited to the object manipulation modification; objects also move if you hit them with a weapon. The direction objects move is somewhat unpredictable and quite imprecise, but you can use this property to move objects at a distance with the gun modification. Sometimes The Narrator will attempt to close doors before you can enter them; if you wedge something inside a door at a distance, you'll be able to stop it from closing and enter it. For example, if you're doing the Countdown ending and the door out of the countdown room is open, you can wedge something in it to reach the area past the door. There's a set of innocuous panels leaning on the right side railing of the power room that are suitable for the task. Another example is the left or right door during the first iteration of the Confusion ending; you can position a paint can in between the door and the wall so that the door can't be closed.

Paint cans, like many items that can be manipulated, are quite small; many small items can block doors from closing but they don't keep doors open wide enough for Stanley to enter them. Fortunately, most doors only require the door to be slightly ajar for this sort of manipulation to work; if it's slightly ajar Stanley can open it further by pressing E or LCLICK on it. Some sorts of doors, such as elevator doors, can't be opened by interacting with it if it's half-open since they are actively trying to close themselves, so you need an object that is large enough that Stanley can fit through the gap it makes.

There are several limitations to this type of object manipulation. For example, most objects get destroyed or their blocking ability is compromised if you hit them, or if a door is being forced closed like in the case of elevator doors. Most objects that don't - in particular the metallic tools in the broom closet, which dent but don't get destroyed - are much too small to be effective using object manipulation, since hitting these small objects is difficult from far away. Additionally, metal objects like the broom closet tools don't move very far when struck due to their density.

**15C - CREATING INTERACTABLE OBJECTS**

There are a few methods by which you can make an object interactable. The first is by invoking The Narrator's hostile state. The objects he throws at you can be grabbed if you have the object manipulation modification. Primarily he will drop ceiling panels, but he can direct other sorts of objects, such as lamps, computers, telephones, and the small sections of fence that you can sometimes find in maintenance areas, at Stanley. In general, The Narrator directs these objects at Stanley at a high enough speed that they shatter on impact, so if you want to use them for manipulation, it isn't enough that they miss Stanley; you actually have to catch them. In areas without ceiling panels, such as the Monitor and Serious-Demo maps, this technique is less effective at generating larger quantities of manipulatable objects.

The other mechanism through which you can turn objects interactable is through Narrative Contradiction. The 'information corruption' effect that Narrative Contradiction invokes also involves the information that records an object's ability to be interacted with. This doesn't appear to have a size limit, meaning that you can interact with larger objects like photocopiers and forklifts. Because Narrative Contradiction and objects are both restricted to one map, this is very limited in usefulness; it can be useful in moving objects generated via Narrative Contradiction _out of the way_ so you can access other areas, though.

PLEASE NOTE that if you try interacting with objects that are stuck inside walls, there's a possibility that Stanley will fall through the map and end up in a white void. This is suspected to be a glitch, and The Narrator may send you to the Serious room depending on the circumstances. Both the Narrative Contradiction and the hostile state methods require the object manipulation modification, so you can't use them to bypass spending four hours in the Art ending. They're more akin to quirks of the game.

**15D - THE HOARDER AND TRAPPED ENDINGS**

Two applications of object manipulation lead to two unique endings. If you take a metal object and use it to jam an elevator door or jam the machinery of an elevator, you can cause the elevator to stop working and it will stop moving. The Narrator will respond to this in one of two ways, depending on if he's broken script and addressed Stanley directly yet. If his role is still functioning as a 'narrator', he'll describe Stanley's inability to use a simple elevator with literally one (or two) button(s). He'll go on to describe Stanley looking around for a help or alarm switch in the elevator, and continue from there, eventually describing Stanley passing the time by fantasizing about what would happen if one day everyone in his office building vanished; essentially, he'll go on to narrate The Stanley Parable. The Narrator's soliloquy lasts for a long time, much longer than any of his other rants. In fact, his narration of The Stanley Parable follows the list of endings you've previously performed, but is lacking the Confusion, Real Person, Escape, Zending, Heaven, and Disoriented endings, if you've performed them. This is consistent with the list of endings/blurbs in the Survive and Repetition endings. Once he gets to the end, he'll describe fantasizing about getting trapped in an elevator, and go on to imply that the next thing to do should be to restart the game. For example, he'll say something along the lines of "Stanley knew that he could keep himself occupied by replaying these scenarios in his head, over and over and over again. So long as he kept restarting, eventually, his time would come."

If The Narrator _has_ broken the fourth wall already, he'll instead directly chastise and reprimand Stanley, and go on to express worry over his elevator system. He'll leave to call an operator to fix the elevator system and won't return, leaving you to restart the game yourself.

The Hoarder ending is more involved and is an offshoot of the Freedom ending. You'll need the 'open all doors' modification to accomplish this one, because it requires you to pick up a ton of items from the office map and transport them to the elevator past the boss's office. You don't need to pick up every item in the map, but you need more than you can get without exploits. Note that if you want to use the boxes left by the 'Future Happiness Foundation', you actually will need to store more boxes than you can fit on the lift. Thankfully, you can hit boxes using a destructive modification and they will compress to a flat shape that is easily stackable, allowing you to store them in the lift more efficiently.

If The Narrator expresses disbelief at how many items you can pack into such a small space, you'll know that you've got enough items to progress to a Hoarder ending and you can stop collecting items and press the button to go down.

In between the office and monitor maps you'll notice a longer transition time; the community speculates that this is because The Narrator is copying the items in the lift onto the other map. This is the only circumstance we've found in which transferring items between maps is possible. Anyways, you'll need to take all of these items, one by one, and move them to the end of the game. You'll need to make multiple trips between the rooms because the small lift can't carry all of the items the large lift held; doing the crouching exploit to go back to the monitor room from the countdown room is typically necessary. Once you press the 'OFF' button and see the theatre door opening, you'll notice that it gets stuck before opening all the way. The distance it gets stuck at depends on modifications you have and the amount and size of items you have with you. You need to use the items you picked up to create a staircase to get past the door; once you exit the door you'll be forced into a cutscene, so you can't continue taking items with you. The Narrator will go on a soliloquy about how Stanley learned to let go of his material possessions and his obsession with hoarding, and that although it helped him along in his journey it was not Stanley's goal all along. This is an Echelon 3 ending so his dialogue varies considerably; it also depends on the sorts of items you take with you. For example, if it's cardboard boxes from the 'Future Happiness Foundation' he'll state it as a potential new job prospect for Stanley.

Incidentally, if you throw a bunch of items off the railing you'll notice the door surreptitiously lower inch by inch to compensate.


	16. The Escape Ending

**16A - THE ESCAPE ENDING**

The Escape ending is perplexing and somewhat obscure:

  1. Take the left door in the two doors room.
  2. Go up the stairs, but back out of the boss's office and let the doors close.



From this point, The Narrator is entirely gone from the game. This isn't a situation where he acts like he's gone, but he's actually still there, like during the Games ending when he leaves, or during the Art ending when he leaves and then 'pops back in to say hi'. In those instances, The Narrator will always respond when you progress (or in the case of the Art ending, he'll respond if you fail the baby game no matter how long you've spent on it). In this case, the The Narrator won't say anything, under any circumstances.

If you turn around, you'll see that door #428 (the one right next to Stanley's office) is open. This door is a bit unique in that you can't open it with the 'open all doors' modification. It effectively functions like a keycard door, but one that opens during normal gameplay. It's possible that The Narrator coded this limit into the modification on purpose, since he'll never open door #428 for you, even with conditioning exploits. Going inside, you'll find a new map where you appear to be on floor #754. Stanley must ascend six flights of stairs; each floor has an elevator, a red door, and two windows that lead into the first room of the standard office (the one with door #430 and #437). The 'copies' of the office occasionally vary in characteristics; sometimes they are missing carpet or wallpaper, or desks are rearranged. There are some correlations between the office copies and versions of the office visible in the monitors of the monitor room; For example, some of the monitors show a red-carpeted version of the office, which can be explored here. They're never lit up like in the monitors, though. The first version of the office will always appear the same as the office you left from. Incidentally, if you initially started this run with an office variant, such as the Notes room, you'll reach a normal version of the office on your way back from the boss's office.

If you head down instead of up using exploits, you'll be able to keep going until you reach the very bottom floor #000. The door here, unfortunately, leads to a hallway with no exit. There are some tarps and industrial supplies around here, as well as two offices. One of them is an un-numbered office similar to the ones seen in non-Euclidian areas; the other one is half-painted, similar to the office model underneath the Portal and Please Don't Touch Anything 3D sections of map. If you go up the stairs instead, you'll eventually reach floor #760, where there seems to be an 'escape pod launch bay'. A sign on this floor is painted onto a wall, and says:

ESCAPE POD LAUNCH BAY

WARNING: ENTERING THE ESCAPE POD WILL INITIATE A RELAY THAT ONCE TRIGGERED CAN NOT BE DISABLED OR PAUSED. BOTH THE NARRATOR AND THE PLAYER MUST BE PRESENT IN ORDER FOR ESCAPE SEQUENCE TO PLAY OUT AS INTENDED. DO NOT PROCEED DO NOT PROCEED DO NOT PROCEED DO NOT PROC

Past the sign you'll find a door leading to an escape pod surrounded by darkness. The escape pod has a bright red striped interior, but the game restarts automatically before you can enter.

What the heck is going on here? The Schedule is a good place to start. If you use an exploit to enter door #437 at the start of the run, you'll see The Schedule in its 'uninitialized' state; the only thing present is the timer. If you check on it on your way back, you'll be able to see The Schedule's 'initialized' state, that is to say, it will have details on it. This time, The Schedule lists the following:

Enter and exit the boss's office

Backtrack to door #428

Ascend flights of stairs to reach the Escape Pod

The Narrator and Stanley escape the facility

I've stated before that The Narrator can't see things outside of where Stanley is. When you enter and exit the boss's office, it seems like The Narrator moves into the boss's office with you, but then he is prevented from exiting it. This implies that not only does The Narrator's camera follow Stanley, but he (or his voice and the scope of his other abilities) does, too. If you try opening this door back up using the 'open all doors' modification and head into the room, you'll be able to meet back up with The Narrator, who will ask you 'not to disappear like that, it scared me'. He'll urge you to continue with the story; you can enter the code in the keypad in the boss's office if you like. If you backtrack, The Narrator will notice door #428 is open and he'll close it, expressing surprise. Both of these outcomes contradict The Schedule, so it will restart the game. The conclusion we can draw from here is that The Narrator is supposed to follow you when you enter and exit the boss's office, and that he's not supposed to have such an aversion to door #428. The reason that The Schedule doesn't immediately restart the game when you trap The Narrator is simply because it doesn't check to see if The Narrator is with Stanley until the very end. In other words, as long as you don't directly contradict The Schedule, it won't restart the game; you can see this during Confusion/Disoriented ending variants, where you can explore other areas of the office without The Schedule restarting as long as you can make it back to the normal ending path. It's also clear that the precise wording of The Schedule is relevant since, if you see The Schedule after restart 3 of the Confusion ending and then disobey the LineTM, you'll reach the monitor room like you're supposed to, but The Schedule still restarts the game because you didn't follow the "Adventure Line -> Nonsense philosophy and music -> Return to the office" sequence. At least, that's the theory.

Note that if you open the boss's office door after they close (or door #428) using cheats, The Narrator is still gone. In other words, this is not a glitch; since vanilla cheats are meant to appeal to an audience that isn't familiar with ~ATH or exploit weirdness, this version of the Escape ending without The Narrator is the ending that the game 'expects' most players to reach. In other words, it's something that The Schedule doesn't expect, but that an entity on an even higher level than it (presumably Wreden) does.

In any case, the Escape ending is relevant because it allows you to explore the game without The Narrator being present. The same thing happens if you manage to escape the Museum ending using a '?' door, or if The Narrator's mood is set to an undefined value such as 1/0. During your exploration, you'll notice that doors still close automatically behind you. It was assumed that The Narrator did this, but it seems like it's something that is either independent of him, or it's a part of him that wasn't removed when he was.

The conditioning exploit version of this is very different from the Museum/Escape ending version; with the Museum/Escape routes, you'll have an initialized Schedule, which means you can only explore places if you can, after your exploration, proceed with The Schedule's written instructions. For both of these cases, this means having the ability to backtrack to the relevant door. With an undefined mood value, you can explore the office with an uninitialized Schedule, so this restriction is waived. Here's a summary of the other endings and what happens when you try and attempt them without The Narrator. As a result of the difference between the two methods, I have delineated between The Schedule's uninitialized and initialized states when appropriate:

**Confusion/Disoriented**

Once you go down the elevator in the maintenance section, the door on the right will be open. The metal shutters will normally be closed, but you can open them if you go here and use Conditioning exploits. Regardless, you can't progress in this ending because The Narrator won't restart the game. The same situation happens if you try and reach the Disoriented ending using the door on the left. If you go to the right, you'll get back to the Confusion ending office, where you can continue back to room #428.

**Museum**

You can't reach this area because The Narrator is required to open the door to the shaft.

**Freedom, Genocide, Hoarder (Initialized)**

You can reach the 'ON/OFF' buttons by going down the maintenance elevator. If you press 'ON', you'll reach the Freedom (or Genocide/Hoarder) cutscene, but The Schedule restarts the game after you enter this part of the map.

**Freedom (Uninitialized)**

You can explore the limited exterior of the Freedom ending, but without modifications available in an uninitialized state, there's nothing really possible here.

**Countdown**

If you press 'OFF', nothing happens. If The Schedule is initialized, you can still backtrack to the right door in the bottom of the maintenance section and backtrack to room #428.

**Incompetent, Failure, Potent (Initialized)**

You can go up to the roof, but the aircraft is missing. You can jump off the building, but The Schedule restarts before you hit the ground; the same thing happens if you attempt the Potent ending.

**Trapped (Initialized)**

The Schedule restarts after you start descending/ascending.

**Genocide, Hoarder, Incompetent, Failure, Potent, Trapped (Uninitialized)**

Since you can't unlock modifications without The Narrator, you can't access these endings.

**Window, Void**

You can exit through the window, but The Schedule will restart the game regardless of initialization.

**Mariella, Coward (Initialized)**

If you have a way to re-open the door The Schedule won't restart the game. Otherwise, it will.

**Coward (Uninitialized)**

The Schedule restarts the game after the door closes.

**Mariella (Uninitialized)**

Can be explored as normal, but you won't die.

**Alone, Hostile, Annoyed, Survive, Repetition**

These ones depend on The Narrator's mood, so they're impossible to attempt. Survive is possible when initialized but there's no list of endings.

**Serious (Initialized)**

There's no effect; that is to say, The Narrator returns if you type in sv_cheats 1.

**Serious (Uninitialized)**

sv_cheats 1 does nothing.

**Starvation (Initialized)**

The Schedule will restart the game after you can no longer move but before the ending happens.

**Starvation (Uninitialized)**

Ending works normally.

**Real Person, Apartment, Cold Feet, Powerful, Leave (Initialized)**

The Schedule restarts the game if you get on the lift or jump down from the platform. There's no way to use conditioning to reach the Survive/Repetition endings, and you can't reach the bottom of the monitor room, so you can't reach them or the Leave ending that way either. This cuts out a ton of endings, honestly.

**Zending, Games, Art, Demo, 128, Critic, Victory (Initialized)**

You have to use object manipulation to create a staircase between the window and the floor of the room before the red/blue doors room, so that you can backtrack and avoid The Schedule restarting. The Zending area can be explored fully and the door doesn't disappear when you enter it. The other endings end at the dev-texture room catwalk.

**Powerful, Cold Feet (Uninitialized)**

Ending works normally.

**Leave (Uninitialized)**

You can reach the outside area, but there's no fade to white, no Narrator dialogue, and no restart.

**Games, Art, Demo, 128, Critic, Victory, (Uninitialized)**

You can't get past the dev-texture room catwalk.

**Zending (Uninitialized)**

The Schedule restarts after the map change.

**Apartment, Real Person (Uninitialized)**

The phone isn't ringing, so you can't progress.

With regards to an uninitialized Schedule, you can split the endings into three categories: ones where The Schedule restarts the game, ones where the ending works normally, or ones where the ending is impossible to reach. If you do the math, the majority of endings that are impossible to reach are of Echelon 3. This makes sense; most Echelon 3 endings require heavy Narrator improvisation or manipulation, and the fact that he's absent prevents Stanley from reaching them. Out of the other endings, differentiating between ones where the ending works and where The Schedule restarts is a matter of determining the following: 1. Does the Scheduled version of the ending have references to The Narrator and 2. if it does, does it occur _before_ or _after_ initialization of that ending? In the case of the Window ending, we know that The Schedule references The Narrator after initialization. As a result, when you enter the Window ending uninitialized, you initialize the Window ending by going through it, and then when The Schedule realizes The Narrator is missing, it restarts. We know the Starvation ending Schedule, as well, and it doesn't reference The Narrator at all, which explains why The Schedule doesn't restart the game. If an ending references The Narrator _before_ initialization, the theory is that the ending simply never gets initialized if you try and reach it without The Narrator. We don't have an ending with a schedule to verify these circumstances, unfortunately.

Both initialized and uninitialized explorations of the office without The Narrator have benefits and drawbacks. With an uninitialized Schedule, you're free from the restriction of requiring a viable backtracking path, but you also can't activate many exploit techniques such as modifications, since those require The Narrator to set up. With an initialized Schedule, you do need to have a backtracking path, but you can also use exploits. The nuances of The Schedule's initialization timing aren't fully known, but in the case of the Escape ending specifically, it's initialized directly after you perform the first task on the list - that is to say, after you enter and exit the boss's office. This means that you can perform exploits dependent on The Narrator _before_ initializing The Schedule and reap the benefits _after_ initializing it.

If you knock down the fence in the lift room using The Narrator's hostile state, and then hide in a Safe Zone to nullify his Malevolence, you'll be able to backtrack all the way back to the boss's office, trap The Narrator, and explore this new zone without him. This is the trick that enabled endings like the Zending, Games, and Survive endings to be explored in an initialized state. Remember, you need to make sure you can backtrack to door #428 while exploring; that's why you need to create a staircase if you're exploring the red and blue doors without The Narrator. If you didn't create a staircase, you'd be dropping down from a window you can't get back through.

**16B - AN INTERESTING NEW MAP**

During the normal course of the Survive and Repetition endings (the 'normal course of an Echelon 3 ending' is a bit of an oxymoron, but anyways) you'll end up in this new section of the office with The Narrator's ending list, containing doors #3B0-#3B9. As I stated in the backrooms section, there are other doors past this section stuck in a non-Euclidian looping area. Specifically, doors #216-#219 are in the non-Euclidian zone, whereas #221-#240 are in an area linked to this non-Euclidian zone but one you can only reach if you enter the map through the catwalk at the top of the lift room in the office map. If The Narrator is gone, though, this geometry changes. The non-Euclidian part is absent and is instead replaced with doors #241-#245. It's unknown why The Narrator's absence would cause non-Euclidian areas to disappear as well; backroom zones maintain their non-Euclidian properties even without The Narrator, so the correlation between 'The Narrator is gone' and 'non-Euclidian zone changes' is unclear. Anyways, all of these doors are bolted shut, similar to the Broom Closet door. The crowbar/open all doors modifications can bypass these checks. If you open door #242 or #244, it'll allow you to reach - surprise, surprise - one of the doors in The Stanley Parable Demonstration Construction Facility. As I mentioned in the backrooms chapter, it turns out these two maps are one and the same, and you can reach the Demo area in this way even if you can't reach it through the Games route anymore.

The Narrator's cooperation is a hard barrier to the Demo ending playing out as intended, so you can't achieve much here. The only unexplored areas of the Demo Construction Facility are the two doors that exist on the higher ledges. One interesting bit of foreshadowing is that there's a long catwalk that normally resides in this non-Euclidian space, but in this case links the ending list and the Demo areas. This is the very same catwalk that you jump to during the flashbacks in the Isolation Chamber, and under normal circumstances it'll be linked to a short section of office that loops back around. The community was pleasantly surprised when the connection between the catwalk's location here and the Demo was finally revealed, because it's a neat bit of foreshadowing in a convoluted, Echelon 3 ending path.

Anyways, what's more interesting here is the fact that there are a bunch of doors that have been sealed shut; this new, normally non-Euclidian area now contains doors #241-#245. As I said before, doors #242 and #244 lead to the Demo. Door #241 leads to a room with the facepunch logo on it; this room can actually be seen in monitor #030 in the monitor room. It's well established that the monitors in the monitor room aren't really linked to rooms (aside from superficial details like monitors #427 and #432), but it's possible that the rooms depicted in the monitors exist in other places. Lastly, doors #243 and #245 lead to each other, but along the way they pass by a window that leads to another hallway. You can break/enter the window using typical methods, but it's positioned similarly to the high-up window in the room in between the lift catwalk and the red/blue doors room. As a result, The Schedule will restart the game if you go through it, because it would prevent you from backtracking to door #428. If anyone could find enough objects, you could create a staircase down using object manipulation, but there's not enough in the Serious-Demo map to pull it off.

A last word about this map, and something I mentioned in the backrooms chapter, is that you can visit the Portal map by entering doors #216-#219. This is true even if The Narrator is around, since the section of the map with these doors is unaffected by The Narrator leaving and has normal geometrical properties. More details on this map in chapter 19.

**16C - TAKING THE NARRATOR THROUGH THE ESCAPE ENDING**

Object manipulation can be used to get The Narrator through door #428. Trigger the Escape ending and place an object in between the open door so it can't close. Then, re-open the boss's office, get The Narrator, and bring him back to the door. He'll try to close it regardless, but he won't be able to and you can open it and go through.

Once you're in the new map, The Narrator will express that 'this is not part of the intended experience' and attempt to lead you downstairs or into the elevator. Going into the elevator leads to a map change and deposits you out of the elevator in the room adjacent the boss's office, and The Narrator simply requests - somewhat shakily - that you go back through the main story. The Schedule is still initialized at this point, so you'll be restricted by it. If you go downstairs, The Narrator will collapse the catwalk you're on, blocking you from going back up. You'll then be taken on a trek all the way down to floor #000, which, as we've stated, has no exit. You could still escape via the office variants through the window, though.

If you go upwards, you would think that The Narrator's strong opposition and/or fear of this direction would cause him to collapse one of these catwalks, but he doesn't. We've seen this behavior before in the Zending, where The Narrator can clearly manipulate the environment to block you from doing an unfavorable outcome, but he doesn't. It's another piece of evidence to support the theory from section 13B that The Narrator has to allow Stanley free agency for the experience to be meaningful.

The Narrator does provide a few superficial obstacles, such as offering alternate choices like the choice to go through the window (if you don't have the jump modification he will create a cute little ramp for you to climb through). None of these will impede your progress for very long. The Narrator will express increasing levels of panic right up until the point you get inside the escape pod. His stated reason for this adverse behavior is that going through the escape pod will 'end his work', and, sure enough, once you enter it, the game closes.

Unfortunately, it's closed for good now. Due to the 'wonders' of ~ATH, players who do this are now marked by the game and can't play The Stanley Parable ever again. Any attempt to open the game will fail, any attempt to reinstall the game will result in a failure when you try and open it, playing it on other computers will fail, and taking over from someone else will crash their game. Someone even tried taking over from another player during the point where The Narrator asks for a second player during the Broom Closet ~~ending~~ , and the game still quit. It's pretty clear that The Narrator isn't the one preventing you from playing, and The Schedule doesn't list any details about The Stanley Parable itself rejecting you; it just says 'The Narrator and Stanley escape the facility'. Other players are unaffected and if they try and play the game on the computer you crashed, they'll be fine.

Interestingly, when you execute the proper Escape ending steps and the game closes, the CD drive of the computer you're playing on, if it has one, will open. Nobody has a clue why this happens and it's currently catalogued as a glitch.

So, what's going on here? The 'escape' in the Escape ending is an escape from The Stanley Parable itself, rather than any sort of narrative-based escape involving the Mind Control Facility or whatever. Take a look at the other instances in which escaping or not playing the game has been mentioned, such as:

**The Apartment Ending**

"And I'm trying to tell him this, that in this world, he can never be anything but an observer, that as long as he remains here, he's slowly killing himself. But he won't listen to me. He won't stop! Here, watch this. Stanley, the next time the screen asks you to push a button, do not do it."

**The Museum Ending (The Curator)**

"Press 'escape,' and press 'quit.' There's no other way to beat this game. As long as you move forward, you'll be walking someone else's path. Stop now, and it will be your only true choice. Whatever you do, choose it! Don't let time choose for you! Don't let time-"

**The Window Ending (Yes)**

"What Stanley liked most was buttons. He pushed them like some kind of glutton. He did it all day, in a meaningful way, but his brain had long ceased to function. Which is why he is in this parable, and lives an existence quite terrible. And if you are not strong, and keep playing along, you too will become quite unbearable."

So it seems that The Narrator and The Curator are both pushing a pro-quitting agenda. Perhaps The Narrator's requirement to give you a choice means that he doesn't want you to complete the Escape ending, since if you do, you won't ever be able to 'choose' not to play The Stanley Parable again? After all, every other choice in the game (aside from the Demo ending) is temporary and can be reverted by restarting the game or the application, and we know that The Narrator knows this. On the other hand, you would think that entering the escape pod and making a more permanent choice would add to the experience being 'meaningful'.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> oh god I had two exams last week, a presentation today, another exam tomorrow, and I think I'm sick
> 
> life is pain


	17. Games in Depth - Minecraft, and the Powerful Ending

**17A - GAMES IN DEPTH: MINECRAFT, AND THE POWERFUL ENDING**

The version of Minecraft that The Narrator loads up is version 1.3.2. The game lacks a day/night cycle, and it also lacks weather. Normally, you'd just wait for The Narrator to finish his house, enter and exit it, and then go through the cave after he opens up the path for you. This is where the Games ending would progress into the second game variant, which will typically be Portal.

Two modifications make the Minecraft environment interesting. With the jump modification, you can escape the bounds of the small environment that you're supposed to be in and fully explore the game environment. The community was quick to map out the world, an endeavor you can explore here: (https://forums.dokidokihackerverse.net/t/backrooms-map/61857?u). With the crowbar modification (the gun modification doesn't work for this) you can break blocks. The rate that blocks are broken is proportional to how the same block would break if you were hitting it unarmed in the actual game. After a block is broken, it will drop a normal-looking block entity that despawns in five minutes, just like in the normal game. These entities can't be picked up, since Stanley doesn't have a standard inventory; however, you can physically interact with them using the object manipulation modification. The block entities don't have a hitbox and don't serve any purpose whatsoever, so manipulating them using object manipulation is just an inconsequential quirk of the game.

Beating any of the games in the Games ending will net you the Victory ending. The Narrator will express a combination of admiration and disappointment as you play; these sentiments will accelerate as you get closer and closer to completion. He'll admire your tenacity and your ability to push forwards in a game that wasn't meant for you to play, but he'll be disappointed that you're invested in this game instead of his own game. This is assuming you can even beat the game, though; Minecraft, along with many of the other games, isn't able to be beaten using Stanley's meager set of skills. Crafting is absolutely mandatory to beating Minecraft, since you need to craft Eyes of Ender to activate the End Portal and reach the boss fight. There are circumstances in standard Minecraft where the End Portal is pre-lit, but this happens in a pitifully tiny fraction of worlds and does not apply to the one Stanley appears in. Stanley retains his abilities from his home game, The Stanley Parable, so you can't, for instance, 'interact' with a crafting table in a village by pressing E.

Water is one hazard Stanley wants to avoid. Jumping is all well and good, but it doesn't allow Stanley to swim. Entering water is a death sentence if you don't have the crowbar; you'll sink to the bottom, or in the case of a one-block-high section of water, you'll just be stuck, unable to get back out. If you do have the crowbar, you can break some blocks near you until the flowing water can't reach past what you've broken, and then get out that way. If you're already submerged, though, you may as well give up, since blocks take longer to break underwater. Stanley has a very limited amount of time he can survive underwater; after running out of air, your eyes will close (similar to the effect in the Mariella ending) and you'll die. This, and most other deaths while you're inside one of The Narrator's games, is technically classified as a Powerful ending variant because it gives the same mood value; normally, you're supposed to jump off the platform in the lift room to get it. The blurb that The Narrator lists in the Survive/Repetition endings is different; for this case, it will be listed as 'Stanley drowned'. There are other hazards that Stanley should avoid, such as lava, cacti, falling blocks, and monsters, and all of these will give the death message that would occur in the main game (tried to swim in lava, got prickled to death, etcetera). Stanley is immune to fall damage, so at least he has that going for him, I suppose.

Villages and other pre-generated structures exist, although the chests, crafting tables, and other interactable objects aren't of interest. This includes villagers, which can't be traded with (nor would trading with them be of use without an inventory). Pigs, sheep, and other mobs can be killed (the crowbar, at first, deals as much damage as an unarmed strike, but The Narrator may increase the damage it does after noticing this, depending on his mood) and they drop their typical drops. Stanley will eat edible items that are on the ground if you interact with them and he is hungry enough; we haven't discussed Status yet, but this is important if you want to spend an extended period of time in the Minecraft map.

Aside from the oceans, which are a death trap, the overworld is relatively unorthodox to explore. It may take you a long time to dig down and reach bedrock, or whatever, but you can reach pretty much anywhere just using jumping and a crowbar. The Nether, on the other hand, is a whole other can of worms. It's theoretically possible to go there, but you need to find a pit of lava with the perfect conditions. There has to be a frame of lava source blocks already in place to create a portal and a water source capable of turning all of them into obsidian from above. You need to mine out the center parts of the portal by hand, but it's possible to create a nether portal frame in this way.

Lighting the portal is another matter entirely. It was thought that lightning would work to light the portal, but if you recall, there's no weather in this version of the game. The block-placing abilities of Endermen were the next candidate, but they are catastrophically difficult to use; the only block that they can manipulate that could be used to light a portal are TNT blocks, which are only found in Desert Temples. They're also much more likely to explode than light the portal. This is combined with the fact that directing the Enderman to place the TNT in the right spot while competing with the water on one side used to make the portal (recall that it can't be removed) is in and of itself a nightmare. Additionally, even in a circumstance where they do place it correctly, and it does light the portal, you'd need to enter the portal before the TNT ignites and blows it up. Thus far, performing a portal light with an Enderman hasn't been achieved.

Those of you in the Stanley% Minecraft speedrunning community are probably dying to point out that you can beat this game, so let's get to the point. You can't beat The Stanley Parable's Minecraft using Stanley's typical skillset. Modifications don't work, the typical controls (HAHAHAHAHA) don't work, nothing will get you there. There's currently no way to craft Eyes of Ender, so it can't be done, period. Instead, you need to use a side effect to invoke Narrative Contradiction. Recall that Narrative Contradiction takes place when there is a mismatch between the number of choices you have and the number that The Narrator (or whatever other entity is controlling things at the time) perceives/presents you having. If you have a side effect that lets you escape the small area that The Narrator puts you in, and you _don't_ have a modification that would have let you do the same thing, The Narrator won't expect you to be able to escape; therefore, you'll cause Narrative Contradiction if you do. The first instance of this was actually done using the 'abs' side effect; Abs allow you to harm things in The Stanley Parable, so they also let you destroy blocks. Once you destroy enough blocks to escape the clearing, you'll trigger Narrative Contradiction.

Narrative Contradiction in this map will change blocks, not including air, into other blocks of a random type. These could be anything. You could generate a TNT block next to a redstone torch, or a sign with gibberish on it, or any other blocks. Chunk errors will also pop up. For context, a chunk is a horizontally 16x16 section of map, extending vertically 256 blocks from the bottom of the map. They're used to store world data in Minecraft; world generation in Minecraft proper can sometimes generate chunk errors, usually as a result of updating a world file to a newer version. These chunk errors are absent of all blocks and reveal the void below, which can be fallen into to kill Stanley.

You're going to want to look out for end portal blocks, or nether portal blocks. You can enter them and enter another dimension, which will, thankfully, result in a map change. Instead of the Minecraft loading screen, you'll be greeted to The Stanley Parable loading screen, and you'll enter the new dimension afterwards. Remember, Narrative Contradiction doesn't persist through map changes, so this will let you continue playing Minecraft after you trigger Narrative Contradiction.

Let's start with the Nether. You might expect something terrible to happen here, since water blocks boil in the Nether, but it's not the case. There's nothing programmed into Minecraft that would make a player take damage over time here, so despite the differences in Stanley's biology, his soft fleshy body is safe from melting into a hot, steamy goo. The Nether is still a cataclysmic potpourri of lava and death, though, and Stanley can die at any time if you aren't careful, especially since you can't place blocks. The primary reason to go into the Nether in a typical Minecraft playthrough would be to reach a Nether Fortress, kill Blazes, and collect their Blaze Rods as an ingredient in the creation of Eyes of Ender. This step isn't applicable here, so there's nothing much to do here other than explore the fire filled wasteland.

End portals summoned via Narrative Contradiction will lead you into the End dimension, and will be accompanied by a map change, just like going into the Nether. In order to beat the Ender Dragon, you're going to need the following:

  1. The jump modification and abs side effect, _or_ the being spiders side effect
  2. The gun modification



You need the gun modification to do the actual killing of the dragon. If you only have the being spiders side effect, you can trigger Narrative Contradiction by leaving The Narrator's small area. Otherwise, with the jump modification and abs side effect you'll need to dig into a cave, since other areas are accessible using jumping and won't be unexpected to The Narrator. After triggering Narrative Contradiction, you'll need to find an end portal block - they look like flat horizontal panes with a starry texture - and go through it. From here, it's just a matter of making it onto the mainland of the End, shooting the End Crystals using the gun, and pelting the Ender Dragon with bullets until it dies. The gun appears to do as much damage as a fully charged, Power V Bow; it's hard to say if this is something The Narrator programmed in, but there's no other clear explanation.

During a Minecraft playthrough of this sort, The Narrator will want to change the map back to the office after Narrative Contradiction happens. This happens because, after you trigger Narrative Contradiction, he thinks that you're a real person and wants to lead you back to a variant of the Real Person ending. Entering one of the portals will let you stall for time a little, since The Narrator will comment on what you're doing and why you're doing it. In order to buy enough time to actually beat the game, though, you'll probably need to raise The Narrator's Dissatisfaction to -0.88 so that his commentary is more detailed and takes longer to get through. Crouching next to certain objects, such as the exit portal, will also help. The speed of the gun modification is quite fast, so this also allows you to cut time.

After beating Minecraft and going through the exit portal that the Ender Dragon spawns once you kill it, The Narrator will warp you back to the office map during the end credits in order to lead you to a variant of the Real Person ending. He doesn't actually get the chance, because a Schedule restart interrupts him. Nobody has discovered a way to get to a true Victory ending in Minecraft, unfortunately.


	18. Status and the Starvation Ending

**18A - STATUS AND THE STARVATION ENDING**

Thus far I've spent a lot of time talking about The Narrator, but I've neglected discussing the other entity of note in the game, Stanley. A notable quirk of Stanley's programming is that he has hidden statistics that are seldom encountered in standard gameplay; these aren't tracked by numerical values by the community, since they're, of course, hidden, but we can talk about them in relative terms. Running down the list, here's what they are and what the community refers to them as:

Health

How close Stanley is to death. Normally, Stanley's either alive or dead, but in some situations, such as during the Zending, Stanley's health will decrease incrementally. A low Health will decrease Stanley's walking speed.

Constitution

How resistant Stanley is to losing Health. The Abs side effect sets this to a high value, which allows Stanley to survive some falls he would otherwise perish to.

Fullness

A counter that goes down with time; it will kill Stanley if it goes low enough, leading to the Starvation ending. A low Hunger will decrease Stanley's Constitution.

Bladder

A counter that goes up with time, and is also linked to Fullness; if it gets high enough, Stanley will - ahem - spontaneously relieve himself on the floor. The Narrator will mock Stanley, or if he's conditioned Benevolently, he'll be embarrassed for Stanley's behalf. The 'stream', as it were, appears out of seemingly thin air if you look downwards.

These four statistics, referred together as Stanley's Status, reset after a restart. They are notable because Stanley will do things of his own volition depending on his Status and his surroundings. For example, if you are within eyesight of the Executive Bathroom, or one of the bathrooms in the improved lounge, and Stanley is about to relieve himself, he will move of his own volition into the bathroom and use the toilet himself. Another, more well-known example is that if you're near any sort of food item while Stanley's Fullness is low, Stanley will consume the food. The container it was contained in, if any, will turn into an interactable object.

Food items themselves are hard to come by, but the most well known one are the cans dispensed from vending machines if you use crouching exploits. Incidentally, if Stanley is hungry enough and you walk up to the vending machine, he may also insert coins into the machine to buy a soda? This isn't consistent. The coins are U.S. currency, usually U.S. quarters. Stanley's fridge in the Apartment ending also has food, but it's only accessible if The Narrator's in a good mood, or if you have the 'open all doors' modification. If The Narrator's in a good mood, he'll also give you food if you're starving to death, as I've mentioned before.

Food items aren't all made equal. Here's a list of items the community has found thus far, and their locations:

**Soda (Vending Machines)**

Increases Stanley's Bladder by relatively more than other foods.

**Coffee (Employee Lounge, PDTA3D)**

Increases Stanley's Bladder by relatively more than other foods.

**Minecraft Foods (Minecraft)**

Doesn't increase Stanley's Bladder at all.

**Snack Cakes (Cafeteria, Modification Lounge, DDLC)**

Increases Stanley's Fullness by more than Coffee or Soda.

**Leftovers (Fridges)**

Increases Stanley's Fullness by more than Snack Cakes.

Stanley's food requirement means that you can't stay in one place forever. This is why you can’t stay in the Happiness emotion booth forever in the Demo ending, and it's why you need to actively seek out mobs to kill in Minecraft if you want to stay there for an extended period of time. The amount of time Stanley can spend without dying varies, but it falls within a range of 80 to 160 hours. After this point, Stanley will collapse on the ground similar to how he dies in the Zending ending, but without the red tint. If you do this in the room with The Schedule, you'll see that The Schedule initializes itself after you're in this dying state, but before the game restarts. This version of The Schedule has only one line:

After a long time, Stanley dies

There's really not much to the Starvation ending, other than the fact that it allows you to see The Schedule as it's being initialized, and that you can do it pretty much anywhere. This led to the discovery of the "filing cabinet sound"; it's the sound of a filing cabinet opening and closing right as The Schedule is initialized. The sound is louder the further back in The Schedule's room you are. The community suspected that this sound originates inside the circular two-doors room, since it's filled with filing cabinets; additional investigation confirmed that one of the filing cabinets in the room opens and closes as The Schedule is initialized; specifically, it's one at the back end of the room. Could the circular two-doors room metaphysically contain the ending schedules that The Schedule draws on during the game? These filing cabinet models are usually static, although they can be damaged using modifications. It's unclear if this is just an obscure lore decision in the game or if there's something more going on here. As I mentioned previously in 16A, in the event you do this ending while The Schedule is initialized with another ending, it'll stop and restart after you stop moving but before you can die.

There's something to be said about fall damage, because it doesn't work the way you'd expect. Stanley doesn't normally experience fall damage. When he does, he will usually die in one hit, such as in the Cold Feet, Powerful, Failure, and Potent endings. In most other situations, Stanley can fall ridiculous distances without dying; the 128, Games, and Leave endings are examples. The only situation where Stanley takes _incremental_ fall damage is during the Zending. It's possible that The Narrator has control over how much damage you can take during a fall; the theory is that during the Zending, he doesn't want Stanley to die, so instead of making him take enough fall damage for him to die, he decreases it to a livable amount. Evidence against this theory is the fact that he's surprised Stanley lives during the first jump, but it's unclear why this place has Stanley take fall damage and all the others don't.

**18B - THE LOUNGE MODIFICATION AND THE NARROW REALM OF STATUS EXPLOITS**

How oh how can we exploit Status to get to new places. Well, Stanley won't eat food if he isn't hungry, but if he eats food when he is, and the food is of a good enough quality, you can go past the amount of Fullness you normally have at the start of a run, and if you do, certain damage will be barely survivable. Leftovers are the only food that's good enough to do this, so you need access to a fridge. Stanley's fridge always contains a serving of Leftovers, but it's only accessible when you're stuck in the Apartment ending. The fridges in other places have a much slimmer probability of containing them (about 0.2% per fridge). This is why the lounge modification is important, since it has eleven fridges and it's easily accessible. The cafeteria past the lift room has a single fridge, but it's much more cumbersome to reach, so in the long run it's advantageous to waste the four hours in the Art ending to pick up the modification. Both of these fridge locations require the 'open all doors' modification to pull this off.

What changes does this lead to? The Narrator expects Status changes, so you can't reach Narrative Contradiction using this. Of the endings that cause death, the Failure, Countdown, Museum, Annoyed, Repetition, Apartment, and Incompetent endings still do too much damage to Stanley to survive, so they're unchanged. The Critic and Zending endings require you to continually hurt yourself to die, so they're still accessible. You can fall down the lift room without repercussions and reach the Leave ending early, so the Cold Feet and Powerful endings are altered. The Narrator will make something up about how Stanley leaves the office searching for medical treatment after falling down a ledge; you'll be heavily damaged when you fall in this way, so it's a believable narration. Some of the games in the Games ending deal variable damage, and this will give a boost to how much damage Stanley can take in those situations. With regards to the Potent ending, the fall from before the monitor room can't be survived, but the fall from the power room can. The Narrator will open a door that circles around and leads back to the countdown room; notably, this door exhibits non-Euclidian behavior, so it'll take the place of the area that should lead to the Incompetent and Failure endings. If you're doing this after pressing the 'OFF' button during the Freedom ending, it's the same situation, but when you circle back around to try and go back into the power room, The Narrator will realize that the catwalk is gone and he'll have to raise one from the floor for you to walk on (similar to the walkways that appear when you press each button in the monitor room). If you fall off again, The Narrator will become increasingly exasperated after each loop. Interestingly, if you follow the steps for the Annoyed ending but deviate here by pushing the 'OFF' button, and then follow these steps, it'll actually lead to a variant of that ending in which The Narrator decides to leave the door that leads back to the countdown room closed, and leaves you to your own devices.

The only other instance in which Status exploits are relevant is in the Mariella ending, although I'll discuss that in that chapter.


	19. The Mariella and Heaven Endings and the 'tarps' submap

**19A - THE MARIELLA ENDING**

A narration-heavy ending.

  1. Take the left door in the two doors room.
  2. Go down the stairs.



The Narrator will state that Stanley can't go up to his boss's office because he'd think he was crazy. He goes on to point out several strange observations, such as not being able to see Stanley's feet, doors closing behind Stanley, and the existence of The Narrator. The Narrator states that Stanley thinks that this is a dream, but he reveals that it isn't a dream; this leads to Stanley having a psychotic breakdown and dying.

Following this, you'll see a cutscene in which Stanley is lying facedown on the pavement and a 'woman named Mariella' stands over him and compares his psychotic episode to her own rational perspective. To start our analysis of this ending, let's examine some of the questions that The Narrator posits to Stanley in the context of our game knowledge.

"Why couldn’t he see his feet when he looked down?"

This is an unsolved mystery; we know Stanley has a character model, and yet the game doesn't use it to depict Stanley. It's possible that this is the character model of a different character, and we're just misled to believe it's Stanley's character model. This quote establishes that not using Stanley's character model here is an intentional choice, though.

"Why did doors close automatically behind him wherever he went?"

As previously stated, the idea that The Narrator is closing doors behind Stanley is somewhat dubious, since they close even while The Narrator isn't around. This statement also rules out the idea that Stanley closes doors behind him in the same way he does things automatically when his Status is configured in a certain way.

"And for that matter, these rooms were starting to look pretty familiar, were they simply repeating?"

Yes, the rooms do repeat. Once you pass the door into the Mariella part of the map, you're trapped there; if you try turning around using the 'open all doors' modification, you'll just go into another one of the repeating rooms.

"Why is there a voice in my head dictating everything that I’m doing and thinking?"

Who The Narrator really is or why he's around isn't really known, although he's pretty central to the game. This does raise an interesting question regarding the idea that The Narrator is 'in Stanley's head' or that The Narrator is really describing Stanley's thoughts; is he? There's not much other evidence to support this idea, although it would explain why The Narrator can't see into rooms that Stanley isn't in. We see The Narrator try to kill Stanley in multiple endings, and there's no way for The Narrator to be 'in Stanley's head' but also be gone in the Escape ending. Also, being in his head wouldn't fit with the whole 'this is a video game' idea, and his references to game terminology and 'loading up' other games or maps is much more prevalent.

Stanley's 'insanity' is an interesting topic to investigate. It might be true that The Narrator literally just adds a red tint to the screen before cutting to black, but what if we assume that this isn't the case? Examine the dialogue that Stanley 'says' at the very end:

"Please someone wake me up! My name is Stanley! I have a boss! I have an office! I am real! Please just someone tell me I’m real! I must be real! I must be! Can anyone hear my voice?! Who am I? Who am I?!"

Stanley goes 'insane' after The Narrator makes himself metaphysically known to Stanley and proves that he is not dreaming. From the nature of what Stanley is saying, it seems that his break from sanity is due to his conclusion that he is not a real person. This strikes me as bordering on a situation where Stanley becomes Sentient. He isn't using specific language indicating that he's aware he's "inside a video game", but he is aware that he isn't real. There's a theory floating out there that Stanley's insanity is analogous to what happens to Sayori from DDLC if you remove Monika from the game before starting Act 1 (or to Yuri if you delete Sayori and Monika, etc.); they end up committing suicide pretty much as soon as you start the game and they gain Sentience. The main flaw in the theory is that Stanley would need to be a fully Cognizant being in order for him to freak out upon hearing this epiphany, and there's simply no evidence to point towards this being the case. Some people have pointed to his autonomous behavior regarding Status as proof, but this behavior is predictable and could just as easily be coded using traditional means. Also, why wouldn't Stanley go crazy during all of the _other_ times The Narrator breaks the fourth wall? I mean, it's practically the guy's signature move. Additionally, committing suicide and going insane aren't the same thing, and if Stanley's autonomous behavior regarding Status was proof of Cognizance it would make more sense for him to commit suicide using physical means while he's down there. I mean, there's an actual car down in that area, I'm sure he could kill himself using it somehow. Or he could just beat himself to death using a mug or something, it's been demonstrated that Stanley can ignore object manipulation limitations and interact with non-manipulatable objects if he's doing it autonomously. In fact, you can go down here with the gun modification and Stanley doesn't kill himself using that. Side note, if The Narrator and Stanley are one and the same, then it would mean Stanley is Cognizant and it would probably mean that Stanley _is_ committing suicide in the Mariella ending. Still, not much evidence to support this theory, and it doesn't solve the glaring fact that The Narrator breaks the fourth wall in a catastrophic number of other endings. Honestly, The Narrator probably just uses some cheap effects before he fades to black, but considering how weird this game can be I felt it necessary to include this wild theory just in case it ends up being true.

Anyways, regardless of the nature of Stanley's psychotic break, you can survive it if your Status is configured in a certain way. If you have the lounge modification and the 'open all doors' modification, you can wait in the lounge until Stanley is hungry enough and then eat Leftovers. Then, detour through the maintenance section, go down the stairs, and when The Narrator tries to start the Mariella cutscene, Stanley won't die. Instead, after the screen goes dark, The Narrator will express a measure of surprise that you survived.

When the black screen fades back, you'll be at the same angle as in the normal ending, with everything as it should be, aside from Stanley's body, which will be absent. After some time, you will drop from this angle onto the floor, where you'll be able to look around and move. Mariella isn't Cognizant or Sentient; in fact, you can tip her over and The Narrator will reveal that she's just a mannequin. If you try hitting her, she won't bleed or anything, confirming this fact. This area isn't a real parking lot, but is instead a small parking lot 'set', complete with spotlights and an empty director's chair with a clapperboard on it. You know the thing I mean, the black and white rectangular hinge doodad that directors use when they say 'cut'.

At the back of this set there's door #161, which The Narrator will open. He'll state that you probably have a lot of questions about what's going on, and that he'll try answering some of them. Entering through this door, you'll enter a map change and enter into the Portal map. The Mariella ending set was actually first discovered by entering it through door #161 from this map, which was a very surreal moment for the community.

From here, The Narrator will lead you through a section of the map with a lot of tarps and industrial supplies in it until you reach door #217, which is accompanied by another map change where you'll reach a non-Euclidian part of the Serious-Demo map. The Narrator is a bit disoriented here, but he will attempt to lead you to the Survive ending area with the list of blurbs in it. If he's especially disoriented, he may lead you back through door #216, #218, or #219 to the Portal map, but we're fairly off the rails at this point so any number of things can happen. The Narrator will try and reach a variant of the Survive ending here, but instead of narrating Stanley's shock and his resolution to survive, The Narrator will speak much more plainly about the cycle of restarts.

**19B - HIDDEN BEHIND TARPS AND THE HEAVEN ENDING**

I was going to discuss the 'tarps' submap sometime later, probably in the investigation of the PDTA3D part of the Games ending, but I'm going to discuss it now because it's worth talking about. This submap contains some pathways to additional dilapidated offices, similar to the model that you fall into from test chamber 00. It's possible that the large 'Please Rate Your Experience' boxes in the wide-open area of this map contain more of these office modules, but it seems that these sections don't have doors, so you can't use invalid door numbering exploits to reach them. Other areas are reminiscent of shots you find in the trailer for the game, with chairs and filing cabinets aligned next to one another. Aside from that, this map contains early versions of the game that you can see in pictures from the Museum ending, such as the maintenance room, the lounge, the countdown room, the boss's office (with bookshelves, without textured walls), and the Zending map. You can create a '2?' door using a destructive modification and it'll allow you to reach an early version of the lift room, too. All of these areas are unlit, and some are modified with tarps, paint, and other supplies. The boss's office, for instance, has a few rolls of the characteristic red wallpaper lying around in the area.

There's a small detour from the tarps submap you can use to reach the section of map that holds the main dilapidated office. You know, the one you reach during the Games ending. You can't actually _reach_ that part of the map in this way, but you can get to an area where you can fall down the black void and reach the HL2 mod section of the map. Regardless of how you get down there, you can open the doors here with the 'open all doors' modification and reach other areas of that mod. There's no non-Euclidian behavior that you'd find in the main game's office, though; instead, most of the doors simply open into a wall, sort of similar to how opening doors works if you use cheats. If you try reaching the "Museum", "Apartment" and "Games" endings of _that_ game, it ends at the elevator, which is inoperable. The lounge's vending machine and fridge are inoperable and static, unlike the vending machines and fridges of the rest of the game; the boss's office is where the "Freedom" and "Countdown" endings end, since the keypad behind the desk is also deactivated. The "Mariella" ending of that game is the only one that has all areas accessible, although there's really nothing here that would warrant further commentary. The Narrator doesn't comment on anything if you go here through the Games ending route, since he's "gone". If you're here through the Mariella ending _of the main game_ , though, The Narrator will provide some commentary on the crudeness of this version of the game and how it was an unpolished and underdeveloped shame. Once you actually enter the Mariella part of the map, he'll then state something along the lines of "Oh… you do realize that this is a video game, don't you?" and go on to describe Stanley having a _second_ mental breakdown over the fact that he's a video game character. It seems that he learned from his past mistake and has increased the damage that this breakdown does, because you can't use Status exploits to survive this breakdown. Additionally, The Narrator doesn't continue to the part of the ending where Mariella is introduced, since that part is already out of the bag by this point. This is technically classified as a variant of the Mariella ending, since it provides the same mood and a similar blurb to that ending.

There's also a map change through door #180 that leads to the Heaven ending. This ending isn't very notable, and is typically accessed by pressing five buttons across different restarts: one on desk #419, one on desk #423, one on the boss's secretary's desk, one on desk #434, and the last one on Stanley's computer. Interestingly, The Narrator doesn't follow you into this map. If you exit it, The Narrator will tell you not to run off like that, similar to what happens if you leave The Narrator behind in the Escape ending and then re-open the door. This does explain why The Narrator doesn't seem to remember this ending and doesn't have a blurb/mood modifier for it.

Door #166 also leads to a map change. Surprisingly, you will end up in the brown warehouse-like space that you encounter in the Confusion ending, indicating that this appears to be the office map. There's nothing you can do here under normal circumstances, but if you have a destructive modification, you can destroy the glass windows and jump out. In the Confusion ending, The Schedule prevents you from getting very far in this void, but in this situation, you can walk past it infinitely to get a variant of the Void ending. Why this exists and why there's a link to this room in the Portal map is a complete mystery. It's possible that most of the maps in the main game were constructed in the Portal map and moved over to the office map late in development, and that the link between the warehouse and the Portal map was erroneously left in the game.


	20. Games in Depth - Portal, and a Victory Ending example

**20A - GAMES IN DEPTH: PORTAL**

There are a few factors that allow Stanley to move through this game:

  1. The Aperture Science Material Emancipation Grill is broken in Test Chamber 00 and all subsequent test chambers,



  1. the tube that deposits Aperture Science Weighted Storage Cubes is destructible,



  1. it always stores an additional cube in the tube after depositing the first one, and



  1. unlike in the real game, there are no map transitions.



These facts allow Stanley to get through the entire game using a combination of object/ranged object manipulation and the 'open all doors' modification. If you're playing the 'hard mode' version of the game using conditioning, the Emancipation Grills are available, so The Narrator does have them as a game asset. If the grills are on, you can't progress past Chamber 00. Here's how the game looks if you try and get past the game through the normal test chamber route.

Test Chamber 00:

You can open the circular test doors using the 'open all doors' modification easily. Additionally, you can destroy the pneumatic tube to get an extra storage cube. The main insight here is getting into the elevator, though; if you use ranged object manipulation to jam a storage cube in between the elevator doors, you can then walk forwards and the doors will jam. If you jump on the cube, crouch to get through the doors, and then grab the cube, you'll be able to get inside the elevator and the doors will close. You'll need to shoot the extra cube into the elevator and use the second one to block the doors, though, so that you can take two cubes with you. The Narrator will be impressed with your effort, but his malice towards you won't subside. He'll be interested in throwing additional challenges at you.

Test Chamber 01:

The Narrator decides there are no portals to help you, wanting to 'see how you beat Portal without portals'. Let's face it, The Narrator was never going to give Stanley a portal gun, even if this one wasn't going to be the dual portal version. You can bypass this limitation (at least for this chamber) easily by breaking the glass with the gun modification. You will need to transport the two storage cubes you took with you from chamber 00 and the one from this chamber through the elevator; this room doesn't have a pneumatic tube so you can't get an extra one.

Test Chamber 02:

You can break the glass here as well, and you will need to because there's no portal gun for you to pick up in the room. To get up the platform, place one of the three cubes up there, and use the other two cubes to build a staircase. When you make it up the platform pick up the last 'stair' of the staircase; you can't recover the last cube, unfortunately.

Test Chamber 03:

There's two gaps here; one of them can be surpassed using the two cubes you have, but for the other one, you'll have to make do using the cameras in the test chamber, which can be shot down and used for object manipulation. If you stack two of them on a cube you can use them to get by.

Test Chamber 04:

The chamber has a pneumatic tube, but the first cube drops too quickly to be accessed. The door can be opened with the 'open all doors' modification.

Test Chamber 05:

First door is openable with no difficulty, and the horizontal window can be shot at to cause it to fail on one side, creating a ramp for you to walk up. The two cubes in this chamber are inaccessible.

Test Chamber 06:

This chamber has a High Energy Pellet… emitter/receptacle, I guess? You can die to it if you walk through, and as part of The Narrator's challenge, he'll make the pellet aim directly at you. You can get it to hit the receptacle to progress.

Test Chamber 07:

The Narrator has learned his lesson and won't make the pellet in this room hit Stanley. It doesn't matter if he did, though, because the receptacle in this room is on the ceiling and so it's impossible to get it and the pellet to connect. We're out of cubes, too, so there's no way to beat this one; even if we could, there's a lot of more difficult chambers up ahead that would surely be impossible as well. There's a better way around this, though.

Between chambers 00 and 07, there are five windows that are reachable, each using two cubes - or one cube and two cameras. It doesn't matter which of these windows you go through, because you're going into a backrooms area; the one in chamber 00 works fine, which means you can do this in the hard version too. Going through doors in this place will let you access all of the other areas of Portal, since the map is using the finite amount of map resources from the main game. Doors will usually link to areas past Test Chamber 19, due to its larger size and quantity of doors compared to the test chambers. You don't have to progress in this area through the traditional path that Portal takes so it's a simple matter of going through random doors until you reach GLaDOS.

**20B - AN EXAMPLE OF THE VICTORY ENDING**

The voice acting for GLaDOS is replaced by The Narrator; The Narrator often replaces other characters in games and the role of GLaDOS suits his antagonistic demeanor at this point in the Games ending. When you reach GLaDOS's chamber, you'll notice it's considerably altered from normal. Normally, you're supposed to defeat GLaDOS by using the portal gun to redirect her bombs back at her, and incinerate the cores that fall off of her. This time, you're equipped with a gun that knocks the cores off of GLaDOS in only a few hits, but The Narrator is going to use Chell's strategy against you. He has set up two rings of portal-able surfaces rotating quickly around him, sort of like shields. When you try shooting at him, he will open a portal on the shield you shoot and open a second portal directed at you, to try and get you to shoot yourself. This is in addition to the missiles, and neurotoxin, which are both unchanged. Firstly, this new boss fight proves he actually does have the assets for the portal gun, and secondly, it's also quite a lot of effort for him to have put in. He will acknowledge that this isn't the normal boss fight, but he states that he had to even the odds since you weren't playing Portal as originally intended. Perhaps if there were a way to get through Portal without using backroom zones there'd be a more traditional GLaDOS fight?

Anyways, you have to shoot the cores off of the boss and incinerate them using the incinerator and the button panel. The only problem is, you don't have a portal gun, and Stanley can't run between the button and the incinerator fast enough. The solution is to use object manipulation; if you lay a core on the incinerator and use other junk to stop it from rolling off, it'll fall in and get incinerated. A faster way is to line up the core on the incinerator and use ranged object manipulation to push it the extra distance inside, if your aim is good enough.

If you're in hard mode, The Narrator will also insert turrets into the room at random intervals; you can knock these over with a few shots from the gun modification, but are also useful for aligning cores with the incinerator.

After defeating the boss you'll see the standard Portal ending cutscene; The Narrator will express disbelief and resignation that you defeated the improved boss. In general, The Narrator is usually enthusiastic about your victory if you're finishing the first game in a Games run, and he's more resigned that he couldn't defeat you in the second game in a Games run. The Narrator will still commend your effort though, acknowledging your prowess with the game, before restarting.

During the next run, there's a delicious cake on Stanley's desk. This cake has eight servings and has the same nutritional attributes as snack cakes. Achieving a Victory ending successfully will always be signified by an item on Stanley's desk on the next run.


End file.
